UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 
AT  LOS  ANGELES 


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AT 
LOS  ANGELES 
LIBRARY 


MANKIND 

RACIAL  VALUES  AND  THE  RACIAL  PROSPECT 


MANKIND 

RACIAL  VALUES  AND   THE  RACIAL 
PROSPECT 


''~T?T-^^J^ 


BY 

n  S£TH   K.   HUMPHREY 


/• 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 

1917 

_^     <>    <-<i   i**    _♦     cy 


Copyright,  1917,  by 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


Published  September,  1917 


HT 


CONTENTS 


FACE 


Foreword ix 


I.    A  Racial  View 


Prehistoric  Man — Great  Age  of  Man — Racially 
Non-Progressive — Individual  and  Race  Develop- 
ment Not  Related — Unprecedented  Demands  of 
Modern  Life — Man  Nearing  His  Limitations. 

II.     Principles  of  Inheritance lo 

Like  Tends  to  Produce  Like — Acquired  Traits  Not 
Transmitted — Damage  to  Germ-plasm  Affects 
Inheritance — The  Persistence  of  Unit  Characters 
— Method  of  Inheritance. 

III.  Significance  of  Inheritance    ....       20 

Man  Develops  True  to  Physical  Inheritance — Elas- 
tic Response  of  Mind  to  Impressions — Heredity 
and  Environment  Compared — Unlikenesses  and 
Inequalities  in  Inheritance — Relation  of  Features 
to  Character — The  Superior  Inheritance. 

IV.  Birth-Rate  and  Race  Values  ...       31 

Man  Discards  Nature's  Methods — Breeding  of 
Man  and  of  Animals  in  Nature — Man  Breeds 
Away  from  Survival  of  Best — Erratic  Parent- 
hood Mostly  at  Extremes. 

V.     Deficient  Increase  of  the  Superior       38 

The  Superior  Inheritance — The  Ambitious — The 
Intellectuals — The  Rich — Women  and  Race 
Values — ^The  Feminist  Movement — Men  Choose 
Inferior  Women. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

VI.     Excessive  Increase  of  the  Inferior       57 

The  Obviously  Defective — The  Ineffective — Their 
Parts  Socially  and  Industrially — Subnormal 
Women — Spreading  Defect  Upward — Philan- 
thropy Assists  Increase. 

VII.     Effects  of  Disproportionate  Increase      70 

Ineffectives  Clog  Social  Machine — Infertility  of 
Superior  More  Vital — Civilization  Dependent 
upon  Influx  of  Ability — The  Signs  of  Decadence 
— Critical  Disproportion  Between  Effectives  and 
Ineffectives — Racial  Decline  Precedes  Defeat  at 
Arms. 

VIII.     Human  Values  in  Reserve 78 

Successive  Breeding-Grounds — The  Migrator — Sur- 
vival of  the  Best — Isolation  a  Factor  in  Race 
Building — Impediments  of  Language  and  Racial 
Differences. 

IX.     Exhaustion  of  Reserves 86 

Race  Conservation  on  New  Basis — Quick  Com- 
munication Hastens  Exhaustion  of  Reserves — 
New  England — Overestimate  of  Individual — 
Civilization  Must  Breed  Its  Own  Race  Values — 
A  Glimpse  Ahead. 

X.     Rise  of  the  Aryan 97 

Man's  Time  Compared  to  All  Time — Physical  and 
Mental  Unlikenesses — Origin  of  the  Aryan — His 
Characteristics — His  Migrations — Racially  De- 
structive Influences — Depreciated  Race  Mixtures. 

XI,     Aryan  Racial  Values 108 

Small  per  cent  of  Superior  Ability — In  France, 
England,  Germany — Ability  in  the  United  States 
— The  Eighty  per  cent  Middle-mass — Persistence 
of  Racial  Differences — Their  Part  in  the  War. 

XII.     The  Nations  at  War:  The  Entente      118 

A  Racial  Search  Without  Prejudice — France — 
Great  Britain — Russia — Race  Suicide. 

vi 


CONTENTS 


XIII.    The  Nations  at  War:   Germany     .    . 

The  German  Aryan — A  Distinctive  Stock — Causes 
of  German  Aloofness — Prussianism — Germany's 
Advantage  Is  Youth,  Not  Inheritance — Degener- 
ating Influences — Germans  and  English  of  the 
Future. 


133 


y 


XIV.    America:  The  Melting- Pot 151 

Making  of  the  American  Type — Race  Mixtures — 
The  Indian-White — Dual  Personality — Melting- 
Pot  Can  Only  Mix,  Not  Fuse — Mongrelism — 
Mixtures  of  Unlike  Types. 


/ 


XV.    America:  The  Negro-White     .... 

Complete  Racial  Estrangement  of  White  and  Black 
— The  Tragedy  of  Two  Beings  in  One — Statistics 
on  Negro  Worthless — Negro-White  Characteris- 
tics— Blood  Ties  Make  Races  Inseparable — A 
Weight  upon  Race  Values. 


161 


XVI.    America:  The  Labor  Immigrant  ...     168 

Effect  on  Race  Values — Racial  Requirements — A 
Measure  of  Race  Value — Southern  Italians — 
Historic  Migrators  and  Labor  Immigrants — Our 
Immigration  Laws — America's  Rush  to  Develop- 
ment. 

XVII.     English,  or  German? 181 

One  or  the  Other  Must  Become  Dominant — 
Racial  Prospects  of  English-Speaking  Peoples 
— ^The  United  States,  Canada,  Australia,  New 
Zealand — Our  Participation  in  the  War — The 
Monroe  Doctrine — The  Uncertain  Future. 


XVIII.     Eugenics 196 

Positive  and  Negative  Methods — Abuse  of  Eu- 
genic Warnings — Unwarranted  Alarms — Eu- 
genics by  Compulsion — Its  Ineffective  Appli- 
cation— Social  Workers — Eugenics  for  the 
Whole  Community. 

vil 


CONTENTS 

CBAPTBR  PAGE 

XIX.    Conclusion 206 

Nature  Requires  Fecundity  of  Its  Strong — State 
Interference  with  Parenthood  an  Established 
Fact — ^Tracing  Its  Probable  Extension — Im- 
pending Need  Is  Fertility  of  the  Specially  En- 
dowed— A  Look  into  the  Future — Our  Obliga- 
tion to  the  Race. 


FOREWORD 

Under  the  stimulus  of  a  growing  convic- 
tion that  all  is  not  as  well  as  might  be  with 
the  inherent  qualities  of  the  human  race, 
science  has  gathered  in  the  last  dozen  years 
more  knowledge  as  to  what  racial  values 
are,  and  the  manner  of  their  inheritance, 
than  in  all  the  years  preceding.  This  knowl- 
edge is  well  set  forth  in  a  more  or  less  tech- 
nical literature,  but  it  has  reached  the  gen- 
eral reader  mainly  through  the  public  press, 
and  so  indifferently  that  its  practical  relation 
to  life  is  usually  misapprehended. 

This  book  aims  to  present  the  subject  of 
race  untechnically — rather  in  its  broad  so- 
cial aspect — and  to  awaken  in  the  lay  reader 
an  appreciation  of  the  fundamental  part 
played  in  human  affairs  by  inborn  racial 
quality.  The  writer  does  not  make  a  prac- 
tice of  referring  to  authorities,  for  the  reason 
that  scarcely  an  assertion  is  made  on  the 
strength  of  any  single  authority.     It  has  been 

ix 


FOREWORD 

the  intention  to  make  no  statement  involving 
questions  of  heredity,  either  in  the  chapter 
on  "Principles  of  Inheritance,"  or  in  any 
other  part  of  the  book,  which  is  not  based 
on  generally  accepted  laws. 

Comprehension  of  the  workings  of  inheri- 
tance in  mankind  brings  light  to  many  per- 
plexing questions.  The  disputed  claims  of 
environment  and  heredity  become  less  tangled 
as  we  learn  to  distinguish  between  character 
values  which  must  be  impressed  anew  upon 
each  generation,  and  character  values  which 
pass  down  through  the  generations  virtually 
unaffected  by  life's  experiences;  and  we  ar- 
rive at  the  important  fact  that  development 
I  of  the  individual  is  transitory  in  effect  and 
does  not  accomplish  race  development.  We 
see  that  in  a  highly  organized  society  the  fall- 
ing birth-rate  is  chargeable  to  the  more  fit  of 
the  race,  while  the  less  fit  are  coaxed  to  greater 
fertility;  that  a  civilization  tends  in  this  and 
other  ways  toward  self-extinction,  and  sur- 
vives only  so  long  as  it  may  draw  upon  re- 
serves bred  under  more  normal  conditions  to 
a  better  grade  of  survival  values.  So  human 
stocks  in  reserve — the  new  strength  that  must 


FOREWORD 

flow  always  into  the  veins  of  a  civilization — 
become  a  matter  of  deep  concern. 

Intermixing  of  unlike  peoples  is  found  to 
result  variously.  When  the  unlikenesses  are 
complementary  and  do  not  involve  great  in- 
equalities of  mental  strength,  the  inheritances 
may  reinforce  each  other  and  produce  excep- 
tional offspring;  but  the  mating  of  radically 
unlike  strains,  especially  of  superior  with  in- 
ferior, yields  for  the  most  part  ineffective  in- 
heritances, well  below  the  average  of  the  ; 
parent  stocks.  This  tendency  to  revert  to  a 
type  approximating  the  least  worthy  of  the 
group  is  assisted  always  by  the  greater  fer- 
tility of  the  inferior  types.  One  need  not  be 
a  savant  to  perceive  the  bearing  of  these 
facts  upon  the  mixings  of  all  sorts  now  going 
on  in  our  own  United  States. 

In  the  new  light  the  repeated  disruptions  of 
civilization  under  influences  seemingly  inade- 
quate for  so  great  disaster  become  less  inex- 
plicable. Our  own  more  intimate  problems 
take  on  a  new  significance — the  Negro- White, 
the  Labor  Immigrant,  and  all  other  ingredients 
of  our  famous  Melting- Pot.  Some  day  we 
may  apprehend  that  the  eflficacy  of  any  melt- 

xi 


FOREWORD 

ing-pot  depends  not  so  much  on  the  melting 
as  on  the  wise  selection  and  proper  mixing  of 
ingredients  which  have  it  in  them  to  produce 
something  worth  while. 

Then  there  is  the  look  into  the  future — in 
many  of  its  aspects  a  new  age  for  mankind, 
filled  with  untried  difficulties;  and  we  see  in 
racial  values  effectively  conserved  the  one 
hope  for  all  future  civilization.  History,  in 
recounting  the  various  happenings  to  man- 
kind, has  not  always  dealt  understandingly 
with  the  inborn  nature  of  man  himself.  To- 
day, a  race  consciousness — not  in  a  narrow 
sense,  but  all-embracing — is  developing  in 
thoughtful  minds  the  world  over,  and  in  its 
light  the  events  of  the  past  will  be  better 
interpreted,  and  the  future  more  safely  met. 

The  stirring  of  this  consciousness  among 
specialists  in  human  welfare,  particularly  edu- 
cators and  social  workers,  is  shown  in  their 
recognition  of  feeble-mindedness  as  a  heredi- 
tary defect,  to  be  eliminated  by  withholding 
parenthood  from  the  mentally  defective.  But 
this  is  a  conception  of  human  breeding  in  its 
most  elementary  form;  the  remaining  ninety 
odd   per  cent  of  mankind   are   classed   in  a 

xii 


FOREWORD 

lump  as  "normals,"  for  no  other  reason  than 
that  they  are  not  feeble-minded.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  gradations  in  racial  worth  continue  on  i 
through  all  humanity  from  the  dullest  to  the  j 
keenest,  and  the  inadequate  birth-rate  of  the  I 
better  grades  strikes  more  directly  at  the  fun- 
damentals of  civilization  than  the  abnormal  in- 
crease of  defectives.  Every  historic  failure  of 
the  race  has  been  associated  with  decline  in  the 
quality  of  its  leadership.  The  feeble-minded 
never  overturned  a  state;  they  are  a  racial  as 
well  as  a  social  menace,  and,  since  nature  is 
no  longer  permitted  to  destroy  her  weaklings, 
state  control  of  their  reproductive  function  is 
logically  the  first  step  in  adjusting  the  propa- 
gation of  the  race  to  our  artificial  way  of 
living.  But  if  society,  dependent  more  and 
more  on  artifice  as  its  complexities  increase, 
does  not  take  the  next  logical  step  and  extend 
its  control  to  erratic  parenthood  wherever  found, 
from  the  excessive  fecundity  of  the  improvi- 
dent to  the  voluntary  barrenness  of  the  cul- 
tured, racial  impoverishment  will  bring  us  to 
the  common  end  of  all  civilizations  since  the 
beginning. 

Man  will  never  so  belittle  his  transcendent 
xiii 


FOREWORD 

inheritance  as  to  attempt  its  reproduction  by 
methods  approved  for  various  forms  of  domes- 
tic Ufe.  His  unique  capacity  for  responding 
to  external  impressions  sets  him  apart  as  more 
essentially  a  creature  of  environment.  But 
we  cannot  escape  the  realization  that  our 
prodigious  labors  to  develop  the  individual 
are  not  checking  in  the  least  the  downward 
course  of  those  values  which  follow  the  inex- 
orable laws  of  breeding. 

The  writer  has  no  insistent  views  with  re- 
spect to  systems  for  perpetuating  human  life, 
except  that  all  systems  so  far  devised  have 
failed  under  the  stress  of  every  high  culture 
to  maintain  effective  inheritance  values.  Civ- 
ilization has  always  been  self-destructive. 
Whether  ours  is  to  survive  depends  upon 
whether  we  elect  to  use  our  superior  knowl- 
edge for  the  maintenance  of  a  breed  of  men 
fit  to  carry  it  on.  The  author  leaves  his 
readers  at  the  threshold  of  the  problem  that 
before  many  years  will  absorb  the  interest  of 
mankind — so  to  conserve  the  inherent  quali- 
ties of  the  race  that  for  once  in  its  history  it 
shall  be  able  to  withstand  the  blight  of  its 
own  culture. 

xlv 


FOREWORD 

It  has  been  thought  best  to  present  and 
develop  this  broad  aspect  of  the  subject  clear 
of  its  many  special  appeals  to  our  interest, 
and  to  commend  the  reader  to  further  study. 
Many  good  books  on  Heredity,  Genetics,  Eu- 
genics, Race  Culture,  Mendelian  principles  of 
inheritance,  and  other  biological  facts  neces- 
sarily omitted  here,  are  offered  to  the  reader 
who  wishes  to  go  further  into  the  subject  of 
race.  Francis  Galton's  "Hereditary  Genius" 
and  other  writings  are  virtually  the  basis 
for  the  present  eugenic  movement.  C.  W. 
Saleeby,  Havelock  Ellis,  Karl  Pearson  and 
W.  Bateson  write  from  different  points  of  the 
English  view.  In  America,  the  books  of  C. 
B.  Davenport,  W.  E.  Castle,  H.  H.  Goddard, 
David  Starr  Jordan,  and  E.  G.  Conklin  are 
among  the  best.  Three  good  books  on  race 
history  are  W.  Z.  Ripley's  "Races  of  Europe," 
H.  F.  Osborn's  "Men  of  the  Old  Stone  Age," 
and  Madison  Grant's  "Passing  of  the  Great 
Race."  Most  of  these  books,  both  English  and 
American,  can  be  found  in  any  well-equipped 
library.  Several  of  them  contain  bibliographies 
which  will  take  the  reader  into  any  branch  of 
the  subject,  and  as  deeply  as  he  may  wish  to  go. 

XV 


FOREWORD 

If  this  study,  in  its  attempt  to  give  a  prac- 
tical view  of  the  racial  problem,  succeeds  to 
any  extent  in  promoting  intelligent  discus- 
sion of  the  race's  future,  it  will  have  served 
its  purpose. 


XVI 


CHAPTER   I 

A  RACIAL  VIEW 

PREHISTORIC  MAN — GREAT  AGE  OF  MAN — RACIALLY  NON- 
PROGRESSIVE — INDIVIDUAL  AND  RACE  DEVELOPMENT 
NOT  RELATED — UNPRECEDENTED  DEMANDS  OF  MOD- 
ERN LIFE — MAN  NEARING  HIS   LIMITATIONS 

THE  search  into  the  past  for  knowledge  of 
the  race's  beginning  seems  to  have  a 
peculiar  fascination.  With  something  of  the 
unattached  orphan's  yearning  for  an  accred- 
ited parentage  we  grasp  at  any  bit  of  evidence 
relating  to  our  forebears.  So  a  few  skulls  and 
bones  dug  here  and  there  out  of  the  earth's 
strata — relics  of  men  who  lived  somewhere  in 
those  incredibly  long  stretches  of  time  which 
preceded  history — are  made  to  tell  us  many 
things,  perhaps,  about  the  earlier  races  which 
they  in  the  flesh  would  not  have  revealed. 

From  the  mass  of  speculation  that  has  been 
woven  about  this  scanty  evidence,  coupled 
with  the  more  reliable  facts  disclosed  by  an- 
thropology, we  may  accept  these  points  as 
fairly  established:  man  was  evolved  through 


MANKIND 

countless  ages  from  a  species  akin  to  the  an- 
thropoid apes;  and  as  a  being  not  so  very  far 
removed  from  the  human  type  as  we  have 
known  it  for  less  than  ten  thousand  years, 
man  has  lived,  according  to  the  best  geological 
guessers,  somewhere  between  five  hundred 
thousand  and  one  million  years.  To  have 
learned  this  much  has  alone  made  the  vast 
amount  of  research  worth  while. 

Because  the  relics  of  prehistoric  man  him- 
self are  disappointingly  few,  and  the  remains 
of  his  implements  and  art  are  in  greater  pro- 
fusion, our  knowledge  of  him  pertains  more 
to  what  he  did  than  to  what  he  was.  His 
accomplishments  are  revealed  so  far  as  they 
can  be  revealed  by  imperishable  remains  only; 
but  the  best  of  man's  handiwork  is  perish- 
able, so  that  of  his  attainments  in  this  respect 
we  are  left  in  the  dark.  Furthermore,  while 
these  remains  tell  us  much  about  his  various 
stages  of  development,  they  disclose  nothing 
of  his  capacity  for  development,  which  is  a 
quite  different  matter.  Man  in  no  past  age 
can  be  measured  by  what  he  succeeded  in 
doing — and  much  less  by  the  little  of  his  works 
that  we  have  succeeded  in  finding.     We  sim- 


A  RACIAL  VIEW 

ply  do  not  know  to  what  heights  prehistoric 
man  might  have  attained  if  set  in  the  midst 
of  our  own  opportunities.  He  had  not,  as  we 
have,  the  accumulated  knowledge  of  the  ages 
to  assist  him.  It  was  he  who  laboriously 
wrote  the  first  pages  of  the  great  book  of  hu- 
man experience  which  we  have  only  to  read. 
Peace  to  his  ashes  ! 

But  we  do  know  that  since  the  earliest  times 
which  furnish  us  with  human  remains  in  suffi- 
cient number  to  warrant  the  drawing  of  any 
safe  conclusions,  the  actual  progress  of  the 
human  stock,  either  in  brain  capacity  or  in 
physical  power,  has  been  practically  negligi- 
ble. It  has  been  negligible,  partly  because 
ten  thousand  years  count  as  nothing  in  the 
ages  required  for  evolutionary  development; 
but  more  significantly  because  civilization  im- 
poses conditions  upon  man  which  effectually 
block — indeed,  reverse — the  processes  of  evo- 
lution. 

The  vastness  of  the  span  of  human  life  be- 
fore even  the  first  trace  of  a  civilization  was 
left  upon  the  earth  taxes  the  power  of  the 
imagination;  but  it  is  perhaps  even  more  diffi- 
cult for  us  to  comprehend  that  man  has  made 

3 


MANKIND 

no  appreciable  mental  or  physical  progress 
since  our  earliest  acquaintance  with  his  his- 
tory. We  blind  ourselves  to  this  truth  by 
assuming  that  as  a  civilization  becomes  great, 
the  human  stock  which  is  concerned  in 
building  it  also  becomes  great.  Civilization 
presents  an  imposing  accumulation  of  the 
work  of  successive  generations,  but  in  these 
successive  generations  there  has  been  no  cor- 
responding cumulative  effect  in  individual  cal- 
iber, in  potential  capacities.  The  accomplish- 
ments of  Egypt,  Greece,  and  Rome — taking 
into  account  the  accumulation  of  human  ex- 
periences at  the  command  of  each  period — 
show  every  whit  as  much  capacity,  initiative, 
imagination,  daring,  as  anything  we  do  to-day. 
What  we  mistake  for  an  improving  race  is  the 
more  complete  development,  the  better  util- 
ization, of  its  inherent  capacities,  and  of  the 
things  on  and  under  the  earth  which  lend 
themselves  to  man's  advancement.  An  ad- 
vancing civilization  demands  an  increasingly 
effective  exercise  of  all  the  ability  of  the  com- 
munity. The  individual  makes  a  bigger  show- 
ing— he  is  compelled  to  make  a  bigger  showing 
— but  he  is  still  the  same  caliber  of  man,  and 

4 


A  RACIAL  VIEW 

each  generation  begins  all  over  again  with  its 
A,  B,  C's,  with  no  greater  capacity  for  learn- 
ing them  because  its  fathers  learned  to  do 
great  things. 

But  having  once  learned  his  A,  B,  C's,  the 
man  of  ability  absorbs  with  ease  the  store  of 
human  knowledge.  He  begins  his  work  in  the 
world  well  up  toward  the  top  of  the  eminence 
so  painfully  builded  by  those  who  have  gone 
before,  and,  just  as  painfully,  adds  his  little 
quota  to  the  top.  The  creators  of  the  pres- 
ent-day enormous  businesses,  with  their  world- 
wide ramifications  and  their  extraordinary  de- 
mands upon  the  administrative  capacities  of 
the  individual,  are  really  in  their  mental  and 
physical  make-up  no  more  than  the  counter- 
parts of,  let  us  say,  the  legendary  Merchant  of 
Venice,  whose  slow-journeying  vessels  gave 
him  leisure  to  overspend  his  money;  or  the 
clever  Joseph,  who  once  cornered  the  wheat 
supply  of  Egypt.  Our  captains  of  industry 
work  with  far  better  facilities  and  in  a  much 
more  developed  social  organization.  Joseph, 
with  his  keenness  for  controlling  the  output, 
might  have  been  a  Rockefeller  in  the  nine- 
teenth century.    And  Antonio,  with  steam 

S 


MANKIND 

and  the  wireless,  could  have  managed  ten 
times  as  many  ships  with  less  worry  over  ''the 
dreadful  touch  of  merchant-marring  rocks.'* 
The  ordinary  motorman,  whose  spectacular 
driving  of  a  fifty-ton  trolley-car  down  into 
subways  and  over  the  roaring  elevated  would 
have  caused  a  Rameses  to  shudder  and  a 
Cyrus  to  turn  pale,  is  doing  no  more  than  their 
underlings  could  have  learned  to  do,  had  they 
been  put  to  it.  They  simply  were  not  put  to 
it.  His  inborn  equipment  probably  is  not  su- 
perior to  that  of  the  man  who  drives  a  lazy 
horse  to  town,  or,  five  thousand  years  ago, 
worked  on  the  Pyramids,  or — for  aught  we 
know — fifty  thousand  years  ago  chased  the 
mammoth  with  a  stone  hatchet.  Our  motor- 
man  is  one  among  the  millions  who  are  now 
trained  to  fill  the  thousand  and  one  nerve- 
racking,  soul-devouring  situations  created  by 
the  most  intensive  system  of  living  the  world 
has  ever  seen.  And  these  millions  are  the  de- 
scendants of  equally  capable  billions  who  died 
with  most  of  their  ability  unexpressed,  because 
they  lived  in  a  world  whose  work  required  so 
little  expression  of  it. 
The  history  of  the  race  down  to  one  hundred 
6 


A  RACIAL  VIEW 

years  ago  is  a  story  of  undeveloped  human  ca- 
pacities, of  resources  in  nature  lying  fallow 
through  the  ages.  It  is  difficult  to  realize  the 
comparative  suddenness  of  this  demand  upon 
the  individual  for  a  more  complete  use  of  his 
powers;  difficult  to  appreciate  in  how  many 
respects  material  existence  for  the  main  bulk 
of  humanity  proceeded  on  a  dead  level  from 
the  time  of  Moses  until  well  on  into  the  last 
century.  Transportation  and  communication 
were  no  more  rapid  in  colonial  days  than  with 
the  ancient  Egyptians.  Nothing  swifter  than 
the  horse  was  known  to  either  Xerxes  or  Wash- 
ington, and  in  every  age  man  carried  his  own 
messages.  The  home  was  the  unit  of  industry 
until  the  birth  of  our  grandmothers,  and  the 
slowness  of  accomplishment  held  the  masses, 
almiost  as  closely  in  one  age  as  in  another,  to  a 
simplicity  of  life  that  precluded  display  of 
special  ability.  Leadership  and  specialization 
were  required  of  very  few.  The  limitations  of 
human  capacity  were  little  comprehended,  be- 
cause the  great  mass  of  mankind  had  never 
been  pushed  within  comprehending  distance  of 
its  limitations. 
Now,  the  devices  of  science  and  invention 
7 


MANKIND 

have  set  up  new  standards  for  the  measuring 
of  men.  The  few  possessed  of  the  quahties 
for  leadership,  initiative,  and  organization  are 
sought  out  and  pressed  to  the  Hmit  of  capac- 
ity. But  it  is  far  more  significant  of  the  revo- 
lutionary change  in  living  conditions  that,  in 
this  day,  knowledge,  skill,  and  ability  for  sus- 
tained, concerted  effort  under  authority  are 
demanded  of  a  vastly  greater  proportion  of  the 
plodding  masses,  who  hitherto  have  directed 
their  own  more  or  less  inefficient  efforts.  The 
day  for  the  working  out  of  one's  own  needs,  in 
one's  own  way,  and  in  one's  own  time,  has 
gone  by,  and  with  it,  possibly,  one  of  the  se- 
rene satisfactions  of  life.  Capacities  are  put 
to  the  test  en  masse.  The  testing  differenti- 
ates men  as  never  before,  and  sends  the  less 
able  to  the  human  discard  with  pathetic  sure- 
ness. 

And  this  complex,  interlocking  whirl  of  ex- 
istence falls  upon  men  and  women  whose  exact 
prototypes — until  yesterday,  as  the  world's 
time  goes — spun  and  wove  and  wrought  with 
their  hands  all  the  things  that  were  made, 
dreaming  little  of  conveniences  that  add  noth- 
ing to  serenity,  of  quickened  processes  that 

8 


A  RACIAL  VIEW 

yield  no  leisure,  or  of  short-cuts  that  impel 
only  to  greater  haste  ! 

No  wonder  that  the  Httleness  of  men  stands 
out  against  the  bigness  of  their  jobs.  The  vi- 
tal concern  of  the  day  is  not  for  further 
achievement.  It  is  for  man  himself,  upon 
whom  the  burden  of  all  this  achievement  must 
continue  to  rest.  The  demand  is  not  only  for 
exceptional  men  who  can  cope  with  the  great 
problems  of  leadership,  but  for  more  capable, 
bigger  men  in  every  walk  of  life.  The  near- 
ness of  man's  load  to  his  fixed  limitations  is 
painfully  in  evidence. 

Never  was  it  so  true  as  now  that  "the  proper 
study  of  mankind  is  Man."  That  study  is 
going  forward  under  skilled  leadership  in 
many  places,  especially  in  England  and  Amer- 
ica. Mankind  was  in  a  fair  way  to  be  eclipsed 
by  its  own  achievements;  but  it  is  a  healthy 
sign  of  the  times  that  the  mania  for  achieve- 
ment has  at  last  turned  to  the  rather  desperate 
case  of  the  human  race  itself. 


CHAPTER  II 
PRINCIPLES  OF  INHERITANCE 

LIKE  TENDS  TO  PRODUCE  LIKE — ACQUIRED  TRAITS  NOT 
TRANSMITTED — DAMAGE  TO  GERM-PLASM  AFFECTS  IN- 
HERITANCE— ^THE  PERSISTENCE  OF  UNIT  CHARACTERS 
— METHOD  OF  INHERITANCE 

THIS  book  is  for  the  lay  reader  who  is 
willing  to  think,  but  not  ready  to  go  into 
the  depths  of  a  new  science.  Technical  terms 
will  be  avoided;  simple  illustration  may  be 
made  to  serve  in  place  of  scientific  and  ob- 
scure discussion. 

One  general  principle  underlying  all  breed- 
ing is  embodied  in  the  popular  expression, 
"like  tends  to  breed  like."  A  comprehensive 
study  of  inheritance  would  take  us  into  the 
refinements  of  this  fundamental  idea,  but  a 
brief  statement  of  the  main  facts  of  heredity 
is  all  that  is  essential  for  the  reader's  under- 
standing of  the  chapters  to  follow. 

It  has  been  established  beyond  reasonable 
doubt  that  both  physical  and  mental  inheri- 
tance in  human  stock  follow  laws  of  breeding 

lO 


PRINCIPLES  OF   INHERITANCE 

quite  similar  to  those  for  any  other  stock. 
This  truth  was  late  in  arriving,  by  reason  of 
its  running  constantly  afoul  of  man's  deep- 
seated  notion  that  he,  of  all  creatures,  exists 
apart  from  the  general  scheme.  Now  that  we 
recognize  ourselves  as  one  of  the  earth's  crea- 
tures, scientific  investigation  has  open  to  it 
the  broad  field  of  animal  and  plant  experi- 
mentation for  determining  certain  correspond- 
ing facts  in  human  heredity  which  cannot  be 
directly  determined,  and  for  confirming  obser- 
vations made  in  the  study  of  man  himself. 

The  most  prevalent  notion  which  the  lay- 
man has  to  unlearn  is  that  the  acquirements 
due  to  environment — to  the  various  experi- 
ences of  life — become  in  some  way  a  part  of 
the  heritage  of  the  next  generation.  The  idea 
that  improving  the  individual  improves  the  in- 
heritance of  the  race  lingers  most  persistently 
among  those  who  have  most  need  of  knowing 
better. 

It  is  now  almost  universally  held  as  a  proven 
fact  that  traits  acquired  through  mental  im- 
pression are  not  transmitted  to  offspring. 
Training,  education,  discipline,  do  not  get 
into  the  blood.     All  inheritance  comes  through 

II 


MANKIND 

the  germ-plasm;  the  germ-cells  develop  within 
the  body  in  strict  accordance  with  their  in- 
heritance through  both  parents,  and  are  no 
more  affected  by  any  life  experience,  short  of 
actual  physical  mutilation,  than  is  the  shape 
of  one's  ears  or  the  mole  on  one's  cheek.  The 
germ-plasm  cannot  be  educated  or  uplifted. 

If  we  make  a  jack-o'-lantern  out  of  a  pump- 
kin, and  afterward  plant  the  seeds,  we  do  not 
expect  a  crop  of  jack-o'-lanterns.  Repeat  the 
cutting  and  plant  the  seeds  through  fifty  gen- 
erations of  pumpkins;  not  a  jack-o'-lantern 
will  be  grown.  The  inheritance  is  from  the 
seed,  not  from  the  pumpkin. 

The  human  seed  is  equally  unaffected  by 
externals  which  do  not  damage  the  germ  itself. 
Life's  experiences  must  be  impressed  anew 
upon  every  generation  as  it  comes  along,  and 
a  thousand  years  of  external  impressions  will 
not  add  or  subtract  or  improve  or  corrupt  one 
hereditary  characteristic  in  the  germ-plasm. 

But  influences  which  physically  damage  the 
germ-plasm  itself,  and  thus  disturb  its  proper 
functioning,  do  have  a  direct  effect  on  the 
heritage  of  offspring.  Alcohol  in  excess,  lead, 
and  various  strong  drugs,  seem  to  act  in  this 

12 


PRINCIPLES  OF  INHERITANCE 

way.  Venereal  diseases  are  supposed  to  be 
particularly  injurious  to  germ-plasm.  Possi- 
bly there  are  other  systemic  poisons,  induced 
by  fatigue  or  by  civilization's  nerve-racking 
complexities,  of  whose  subtle  effect  on  the 
germ-plasm,  and  thus  on  the  race,  we  are  still 
unaware. 

It  is  of  great  significance  that  the  only  en- 
vironmental influences  which  affect  inheri- 
tance at  all  are  destructive  influences,  tending 
to  impair  the  normal  heritages  of  offspring. 
This  leads  to  the  rather  sombre  conclusion  that 
while  an  individual  cannot  possibly  add  value 
to  the  heritage  of  his  children  by  the  most  ex- 
emplary behavior,  his  misbehavior  may  seri- 
ously damage  it.  The  most  that  can  be  done 
for  the  germ-plasm  is  to  maintain  its  normal 
condition  of  physical  vigor. 

Nearly  every  trait  as  we  view  it  in  the  indi- 
vidual is  really  a  more  or  less  complex  ensem- 
ble of  simple,  or  unit,  characters.  "Unit" 
characters  may  roughly  be  defined  as  the  indi- 
visible items  which  make  up  the  character- 
building  material.  These  combinations  are  of 
almost  infinite  variety,  and  some  of  them  may 
have  the  appearance  of  new  traits;  but  the 

13 


MANKIND 

novelty  is  merely  one  of  combination,  and  en- 
vironment has  no  more  part  in  arranging  these 
combinations  than  in  creating  the  units  which 
compose  them. 

Excepting  always  the  systemic  poisons 
which  actually  mutilate  the  germ-plasm,  the 
persistence  of  unit  characters  through  the  gener- 
ations unchanged  hy  life  histories  is  the  great 
fact  of  reproduction.  Thus,  the  child  inherits, 
not  from  the  traits  which  his  parents  and 
grandparents  chanced  to  develop  in  their  lives, 
but  from  the  traits  which  descended  to  them 
and  through  them  in  the  essentially  immortal 
germ-plasm.  The  son  is  not  precisely  a  "chip 
off  the  old  block";  more  correctly,  he  is  a  chip 
off  the  old  block's  original  make-up,  and  that 
make-up  reaches  back  for  generations.  His 
inborn  equipment  has  no  trace  of  the  veneers 
which  time  put  upon  his  parents.  We  may 
regret  that  the  child  does  not  partake  directly 
of  the  parents'  chastened  maturity,  but  if  we 
stop  to  consider  that  in  that  case  it  would  also 
partake  of  every  physical  blemish  and  mental 
twist  which  "the  slings  and  arrows  of  out- 
rageous fortune"  had  put  upon  them,  we  may 
be  thankful  that  each  child,  unless  its  inheri- 

14 


PRINCIPLES  OF  INHERITANCE 

tance  has  been  actually  poisoned,  begins  with 
a  clean  slate  the  development  of  its  inherited 
virtues  and  defects. 

The  child's  inheritance  of  the  traits  which  he 
is  to  develop  is  determined  irrevocably  by  the 
union  of  two  single  cells  from  the  germinal 
material  of  its  parents.  Since  no  two  cells 
developed  by  either  parent  contain  exactly  the 
same  combination  of  unit  characters,  no  two 
children  of  the  same  parents  have  exactly  the 
same  inheritance;  and  as  theirs  is  the  closest 
relationship  possible,  it  follows  that  the  prob- 
ability of  any  two  people  being  bom  into  the 
world  exactly  alike  is  infinitely  small. 

According  to  the  laws  of  chance,  the  child's 
traits  will  more  nearly  resemble  those  of  his 
parents,  since  he  and  they  draw  their  inheri- 
tances from  more  nearly  similar  germinal  ma- 
terial. But  he  also  has  the  probability — di- 
minishing rapidly  with  the  remoteness  of  the 
ancestor — of  inheriting  from  the  entire  list  of 
his  forebears  other  traits  which  may  not  have 
appeared  in  his  parents,  or  in  any  intervening 
generation.  The  average  probability  of  in- 
heritance, as  generally  agreed  upon,  is  one- 
half  from  the  parents,  one-fourth  from  the 

IS 


MANKIND 

grandparents,  one-eighth  from  the  great- 
grandparents,  and  so  on  through  an  infinite 
series  of  fractions,  whose  sum  is  one,  which 
represents  the  complete  inheritance.  But  the 
actual  degree  of  hereditary  likeness  between 
the  child  and  either  parent,  grandparent,  or 
other  ancestor  varies  more  or  less,  being  de- 
pendent upon  the  characteristics  within  the 
two  germ-cells  which  happen  to  unite. 

While  the  proposition  "like  tends  to  breed 
like"  is  generally  true,  since  three-fourths  of 
the  average  inheritance  goes  no  further  back 
than  the  grandparents,  it  is  easy  to  see  that 
radical  unlikenesses  are  to  be  expected  from  a 
mixed  ancestry.  The  germinal  material  made 
up  from  their  unlike  contributions  offers  a 
wide  range  of  inheritance  possibilities.  Now 
it  happens  that  man  is  the  only  creature  that 
habitually  mates  with  unlikeness  among  his 
immediate  kind,  and  is  not  over-particular 
when  it  comes  to  mixing  extreme  types,  or 
even  races.  Consequently  the  human  breed  is 
the  most  thoroughly  mongrelized,  and  pro- 
duces the  most  diversified  offspring,  of  any  on 
earth.  There  is  no  telling  what  unheard-of 
trait  a  child  sometimes  may  pick  out  of  his 

i6 


PRINCIPLES  OF  INHERITANCE 

ancestry — and  it  comes  as  a  surprise  to  most 
parents,  because  their  acquaintance  with  the 
personal  traits  of  their  ancestors  is  sHght. 
The  notion  is  curiously  prevalent  that  only 
undesirable  traits  thus  reappear;  but  what  is 
more  natural  than  that  fond  parents  should 
regard  a  child's  unwelcome  characteristics  as 
a  stroke  descended  from  oblivion,  while  its  vir- 
tues are  modestly  accepted  as  reflections  of 
their  own  ?  As  a  matter  of  fact,  some  people 
would  be  poor  sticks  indeed,  had  they  not 
chanced  upon  a  few  ancestral  virtues  which 
their  parents  overlooked. 

So  much  for  the  fundamental  principles  of 
inheritance.  The  investigations  of  recent 
years  have  taken  our  knowledge  far  beyond 
the  scope  of  these  simple  statements.  But 
for  a  broad  view  of  the  race's  history  and  of 
the  race's  future,  and  for  a  conception  of  the 
separateness  of  racial  and  cultural  influences, 
certain  basic  facts  should  be  kept  in  mind : 

Hereditary  likeness  is  the  general  expecta- 
tion. The  only  human  qualities  which  endure 
are  those  which  are  bred  in  the  race.  All  en- 
vironmental effort  must  be  expended  anew 

17 


MANKIND 

upon  each  generation.  We  may  seemingly 
transform  the  character  of  a  man,  and  still  no 
more  affect  his  germ-plasm  than  his  eyebrows. 
Inheritance  fixes  the  capacity  of  the  individual 
to  respond  to  environment,  to  develop;  upon 
the  quality  of  inheritance  depends  primarily 
the  quality  of  all  human  achievement,  of  civ- 
ilization itself.  Thus  the  first  essential  for 
stable  progress  is  a  race  of  humans  well  bred, 
in  the  literal  sense. 

However  we  may  succeed  in  applying  the 
principles  of  heredity  for  the  improvement  of 
other  forms  of  life,  anything  like  the  same 
methods  are  unthinkable  for  the  human  spe- 
cies, and  not  even  to  be  desired,  since  the  re- 
sults to  be  sought  are  not  at  all  similar.  Yet 
it  must  be  admitted  that  our  new  knowledge 
of  these  matters  imposes  upon  us  a  new  re- 
sponsibility for  the  future  quality  of  the  race. 
Our  present  most  conspicuous  effort  is  to  get 
the  utmost  out  of  human  material  as  it  comes 
to  us;  Its  coming  is  still  at  haphazard,  as  in 
the  days  of  Abraham.  Unless  we  make  use 
of  our  knowledge  to  correct  the  disastrous 
breeding  faults  which  develop  with  a  high  cul- 
ture, we  shall  sometime  be  no  better  off  than 

i8 


PRINCIPLES  OF  INHERITANCE 

older  peoples  who  went  to  grief  in  ignorance 
of  these  faults,  charging  their  downfall  to  fail- 
ure of  the  gods.  It  would  be  a  failure  of 
human  skill  in  its  supreme  test  if  we  were  to 
succeed  in  bringing  all  other  creatures  to  per- 
fection and  fail  with  our  own  kind.  Such  con- 
siderations as  these  lend  a  vital  interest  to  the 
study  of  racial  problems. 


19 


CHAPTER    III 
SIGNIFICANCE  OF   INHERITANCE 

MAN  DEVELOPS  TRUE  TO  PHYSICAL  INHERITANCE — ELAS- 
TIC RESPONSE  OF  MIND  TO  IMPRESSIONS — HEREDITY 
AND  ENVIRONMENT  COMPARED — UNLIKENESSES  AND 
INEQUALITIES  IN  INHERITANCE — RELATION  OF  FEA- 
TURES  TO    CHARACTER — THE    SUPERIOR    INHERITANCE 

NOW  it  may  be  asked,  "What  is  the  sig- 
nificance of  inherited  traits  ?  What  do 
they  do  for  the  every-day  man  as  we  see  him 
on  the  street  ?'* 

In  his  physical  aspect,  man,  given  anything 
like  normal  conditions,  develops  true  to  the 
image  predetermined  by  inheritance,  down  to 
the  least  item  in  his  anatomy.  It  is  a  remark- 
able fact  that  physical  inheritance  yields  very 
little  to  any  environmental  influences,  short 
of  malnutrition,  accident,  and  disease — and 
these  three  are  abnormal  conditions.  In  the 
usual  case,  physical  response  to  environment 
is  fairly  direct,  measurable,  and  understood. 
In  this  respect  man  is  on  a  level  with  the 
animals. 

20 


SIGNIFICANCE  OF  INHERITANCE 

But  the  human  mind,  in  its  elastic  response 
to  a  vast  multitude  of  external  influences,  so 
far  transcends  every  other  phenomenon  which 
man  is  called  upon  to  study,  that  he  has  diffi- 
culty in  conceiving  its  ultimate  subservience 
to  the  immutable  laws  of  heredity.  The  mind 
so  quickly  reflects  external  impressions  that 
impressed  traits  and  hereditary  traits  appear 
confusingly  alike  and  intermingled.  Its  ex- 
pansive willingness  to  take  on  all  manner  of 
influences,  good  and  bad,  leads  many  enthu- 
siasts to  the  buoyant  view  that  proper  en- 
vironment can  make  up  for  almost  any  lack 
in  mental  inheritance. 

Controversies  over  the  relative  importance 
of  heredity  and  environment  are  pointless, 
since  the  two  factors  are  so  essentiafly  unlike 
that  comparison  is  impossible.  Heredity  sup- 
plies the  material,  both  physical  and  mental; 
it  is  the  business  of  environment  to  develop 
this  material  into  the  finished  product,  as 
manifested  in  the  individual.  Obviously,  the 
effect  which  environment  can  produce  in  any 
case  is  limited  by  the  capacity  of  the  inheri- 
tance to  respond.  The  best  carpenter  in  the 
world  cannot  make  a  mahogany  table  out  of 

21 


MANKIND 

pine  boards,  although  he  may  make  a  good 
imitation  of  one.  So  may  "uplift"  enthusi- 
asts bedeck  a  poor  stick  of  a  man  with  the 
habiliments  of  virtue  and  prop  him  up  in  the 
straight  and  narrow  path,  without  making  a 
real  man  of  him.  But  the  carpenter  has  the 
best  of  it — veneers  stick  to  a  cheap  table  bet- 
ter than  to  a  cheap  man. 

Good  material  for  the  making  of  a  man  or 
a  table  is  the  prime  essential.  Inherited  lim- 
itations are  fixed;  environmental  limitations 
may  be  overcome.  A  mentally  strong  man 
in  an  unfortunate  environment  is  self-impelled 
to  get  out  of  it  and  into  one  which  matches  his 
powers.  His  forceful  inheritance  is  the  ever- 
present,  dominating  factor  which  shapes  his 
career.  A  weak  man  settles  into  his  environ- 
ment unless  carried  forward  by  external  im- 
pulses; but  external  impulses  are  spasmodic, 
while  his  environment  remains  the  ever-pres- 
ent, dominating  factor  which  shapes  his  ca- 
reer. The  strong  inheritance  may  laugh  at 
environment;  the  weak  succumbs  to  it. 

The  extraordinary  effort  now  put  forth  to 
improve  and  make  fit  the  individual  does  not 
get  him  past  his  inherent  mental  limitations; 

22 


SIGNIFICANCE  OF  INHERITANCE 

it  really  brings  them  out  into  stronger  relief. 
In  our  estimates  of  men,  for  whatever  pur- 
pose, mental  limitations  are  the  most  ob- 
served of  all  human  traits.  We  are  viewing 
and  measuring  hereditary  mental  differences 
in  almost  every  one  of  our  daily  contacts — dif- 
ferences which  cannot  be  accounted  for  by 
differences  in  life  experiences.  From  the  be- 
ginning to  the  end  of  life  each  one  of  us  un- 
wittingly proclaims  the  various  inclinations 
and  limitations  of  his  mental  inheritance  by 
responding  variously  to  experiences;  more 
readily  to  this,  less  readily  to  that,  and  to 
some  others  not  at  all. 

Personal  intimacies  bring  to  light  these  in- 
herent characteristics.  We  are  most  keenly 
alive  to  them  among  members  of  our  own 
fam.ily,  for  whom  environment  has  been  simi- 
lar. In  a  less  degree  they  enter  into  all  our 
personal  estimates.  We  naturally  seek  friends 
among  those  in  whom  a  similarity  of  environ- 
ment has  developed  congenial  tastes,  plea- 
sures, habits,  and  outlook — all  acquired  char- 
acteristics— but  as  acquaintance  proceeds  we 
hold  as  friends  only  those  whose  more  intimate 
qualities — qualities  which  have  not  been  re- 

23 


MANKIND 

modelled  by  environment — prove  to  be  com- 
patible with  our  own. 

The  search  for  inborn  traits  does  not  wait 
for  intimacy.  We  begin  it  the  moment  we 
look  a  stranger  in  the  face.  Mental  individ- 
uality is  closely  bound  up  with  physical  indi- 
viduality. Certain  mental  traits  correspond 
so  habitually  to  certain  physical  features  that 
we  proceed,  without  a  fixed  rule  in  our  heads 
for  doing  so,  to  "size  up"  the  eyes,  nose, 
mouth,  chin,  forehead — the  tout  ensemble — 
and  set  a  measure  of  the  man  before  we  know 
him.  In  a  sense,  the  mind  is  cast  into  the 
physical  mould,  and  the  rigidity  of  this  mould 
argues  a  corresponding  stubbornness  of  in- 
herited mental  characteristics.  The  correla- 
tion of  mental  and  physical  parts  has  been  too 
much  exploited  by  charlatans,  and  too  little 
studied  by  scientists. 

These  unlikenesses  in  character  traits  sug- 
gest the  inequalities  in  mental  inheritance 
which  we  all  know  exist,  yet  scarcely  compre- 
hend in  their  true  significance.  We  ascribe 
altogether  too  many  of  these  obvious  inequali- 
ties to  differences  in  opportunity  and  training. 

24 


SIGNIFICANCE  OF  INHERITANCE 

Because  there  is  a  certain  sameness  in  untried 
youth,  it  does  not  follow  that  similar  opportu- 
nities will  disclose  anything  like  equal  capaci- 
ties. A  wheelbarrow  and  a  sewing-machine  in 
the  back  yard  are  equally  inert — neither  ex- 
presses anything.  But  that  does  not  imply 
that  by  skilful  handling  the  wheelbarrow  can 
be  made  to  sew. 

Inequality — of  races,  of  individuals  within  a 
race,  within  a  community,  within  a  family — 
that  is  an  idea  fundamental  to  the  study  of 
mankind. 

Man  is  a  gregarious  animal.  Luckily  for 
social  peace,  a  wholesome  inclination  to  con- 
form in  all  essentials  to  the  social  order  sets 
ninety  per  cent  of  us  to  a  constant  redirecting 
of  some,  and  suppressing  of  other,  inherited 
traits.  We  aim  to  present  a  harmonious  front 
to  society  and  conceal  the  discords.  Society 
exists  because  we  succeed  so  admirably  in  do- 
ing this.  The  average  good  citizen  may  be 
safely  permitted  at  large  only  because  he  keeps 
a  few  of  his  natural-born  proclivities  locked 
up.  He  keeps  them  locked  up,  not  merely  be- 
cause he  wishes  to  deceive  his  fellow  men  as 

2S 


MANKIND 

to  their  existence,  but  because  he  himself  rec- 
ognizes their  undesirability. 

As  for  the  ninety  per  cent  who  willingly 
conform  to  the  social  order,  these  distinctive 
inherent  traits  yield  so  readily  to  the  persua- 
sive efforts  of  the  individual  and  society  that 
they  are  of  little  importance  in  any  but  a 
technical  consideration  of  inheritance  values. 
They  give  us  individuality,  and  add  spice  to 
acquaintance;  they  may  break  up  friendships, 
but  they  do  not  disrupt  the  community. 
People  who  cannot  abide  each  other  may  be 
equally  conscientious  and  valuable  citizens. 

The  inheritances  of  special  capacity  or  tal- 
ent for  doing  certain  specific  things,  such  as 
the  power  to  create  art,  music,  poetry,  and  the 
like,  while  of  great  value  to  the  community, 
are  rarely  attended  by  well-rounded  capacity 
in  other  directions,  and  are  possessed  by  so 
few  that  a  consideration  of  inheritance  values 
for  the  main  bulk  of  humanity  may  ignore 
them.  The  inheritance,  too,  of  specific  incli- 
nation to  deceit  and  crime  in  persons  other- 
wise normal  seems  to  be  based  on  reliable  evi- 
dence; if  true,  the  cases  are  exceptional;  we 
are   going   to   look    elsewhere   for   the   main 

26 


SIGNIFICANCE  OF  INHERITANCE 

sources  of  habitual  criminality  and  general 
undesirableness. 

What,  then,  if  not  the  gift  of  special  talent, 
is  the  nature  of  the  inheritance  which  leads 
to  great  achievement  ? 

The  superior  inheritance  is  a  mind  balanced 
to  meet  the  unusual  demands  of  life  unusually- 
well,  rather  than  one  foreordained  to  distin- 
guish itself  in  a  single  respect;  it  is  of  that 
quality  of  brain — one  might  almost  add,  quan- 
tity of  brain — which  impels  to  creative  lead- 
ership in  whatever  activity  it  may  select.  It 
dominates  environment,  and  advances  into 
new  undertakings.  It  is  the  mark  of  the 
social  migrator — the  man  of  initiative  who 
extricates  himself  from  the  mass  and  changes 
some  bit  of  the  world,  for  better  or  for  worse, 
by  his  contact  with  it. 

Minds  of  this  transcendent  quality  give 
order  and  meaning  to  all  constructive  effort. 
They  co-ordinate  and  make  effective  the  la- 
bors of  the  vast  masses  of  humankind — the 
mediocrity  that  accepts  the  world  as  it  finds 
it,  plays  its  passive  part  in  its  chance  environ- 
ment with  undistinguished  honor,  and  goes 
to  oblivion. 

27 


MANKIND 

The  clog  in  this  workable  arrangement  is 
the  ineflFective  mind.  Mental  deficiency  has 
its  mark  upon  the  great  majority  of  those  who 
fail  habitually  in  their  obligation  to  society. 
An  ill-equipped,  meagre,  or  distorted  brain 
has  no  place  in  the  general  scheme.  Its  main 
offense  is  that  it  must  continue  to  exist  un- 
placed. It  fails  to  conform  because  of  gen- 
eral lack  of  brain  capacity  to  turn  environ- 
ment to  good  account,  not  often  because  of 
any  inborn  desire  to  commit  unsocial  acts. 

These  three  measures  roughly  outline  the 
grades  of  mental  capacity.  All  humankind 
cannot  by  any  means  be  assorted  into  three 
distinct  classes,  or  into  any  number  of  classes. 
Mental  inheritances  are  of  such  infinite  va- 
riety that  the  line  of  gradation  descends  from 
the  keenest  intellect  to  the  dullest  without  a 
distinguishing  break.  But  classification  of 
human  beings  for  specific  purposes  is  as  proper 
and  necessary  as  the  classification  of  any  other 
form  of  life,  regardless  of  the  "border-line" 
individuals  who  cannot  be  classified. 

This  complex  characteristic  of  the  excep- 
tional man — call  it  all-round  mental  capacity, 
intellectual  caliber,  or  quality  or  quantity  of 

28 


SIGNIFICANCE  OF  INHERITANCE 

brain  force — is  made  up  of  many  simpler  char- 
acteristics, in  a  great  variety  of  combinations; 
for  that  reason  the  element  of  chance  is  largely 
eliminated  from  its  probability  of  inheritance 
by  offspring.  Thus  it  happens  that  this  most 
important  attribute  of  man  is  also  the  most 
certain  in  its  adherence  to  the  laws  governing 
heredity — a  fact  of  great  encouragement  to 
those  who  would  like  to  see  the  race  disen- 
tangled from  its  load  of  worthlessness  and 
raised  to  greater  mental  strength. 

The  reader  probably  has  noticed  by  this 
time  that  much  emphasis  is  laid  upon  the 
value  of  mental  inheritance,  while  physical 
inheritance  values  have  had  little  considera- 
tion. This  is  because,  physically,  the  race 
seems  to  be  adequate  to  all  reasonable  de- 
mands upon  it.  A  race  of  giants  and  Me- 
thuselahs  could  scarcely  have  done  better. 
Variations  in  physique  have  had  small  part 
in  making  and  unmaking  civilizations. 

While  certain  influences  damaging  to  physi- 
cal values  have  been  introduced  by  present- 
day  civilization,  there  is  not  the  slightest 
evidence  that  the  race  as  a  whole  has  deterio- 
rated physically  in  all  its  long  history.     And, 

29 


MANKIND 

finally,  we  do  not  have  to  worry  over  man's 
physical  inheritance,  for  the  simple  reason 
that  the  physically  vigorous  do  their  full  share, 
and  more,  toward  the  propagation  of  the  race. 

If  as  much  could  be  said  for  the  mentally 
vigorous,  the  earth  would  not  be  strewn  with 
the  tragic  wrecks  of  civilization  after  civiliza- 
tion. 

The  greatest  gift  of  inheritance  is  brains, 
and  with  lack  of  them  the  strongest  man  is 
the  most  helpless  of  animals. 


CHAPTER   IV 
BIRTH-RATE  AND  RACE  VALUES 

MAN  DISCARDS  NATURE's  METHODS — BREEDING  OF  MAN 
AND  OF  ANIMALS  IN  NATURE — MAN  BREEDS  AWAY 
FROM  SURVIVAL  OF  BEST — ERRATIC  PARENTHOOD 
MOSTLY   AT    EXTREMES 

IT  is  a  confirmed  habit  of  the  thoughtless  to 
meet  all  warnings  of  racial  decline  with  a 
vague  faith  that  nature  will  somehow  step  in 
before  serious  mischief  is  done,  and  keep  the 
race  going  on  forever  unimpaired — having  in 
mind,  perhaps,  the  seeming  permanence  of 
other  forms  of  life  more  directly  under  her 
control.  It  is  a  beautiful  thought  that  na- 
ture is  standing  by  with  a  generous  purpose 
to  set  right  whatever  our  folly  may  happen 
to  set  wrong,  but  the  fact  is  that  man  broke 
away  from  nature's  scheme  for  maintaining 
species  almost  at  the  beginning.  The  first 
use  man  made  of  his  wits  was  to  soften  the 
conditions  of  living.  Right  there  he  opened 
a  new  portal  to  survival  values.  The  old 
physical  basis  of  survival  of  the  fittest  gave 

31 


MANKIND 

way  to  the  new — the  survival  of  the  wittiest. 
The  man  who  first  drew  over  his  back  a  skin 
other  than  his  own  made  possible  the  survival 
of  a  being  who  could  not  live  without  para- 
phernalia. It  was  he  who  started  the  arti- 
ficial life  that  has  brought  us  to  apartment- 
houses  and  pocketbooks. 

To-day  we  survive  the  destructive  agencies 
of  nature,  not  because  of  physical  fitness,  but 
because  of  the  many  artifices  with  which  our 
ingenuity  has  surrounded  us.  Almost  the 
only  items  we  now  take  direct  from  nature 
are  breath  and  sleep.  And  these  many  arti- 
fices lead  to  still  another  phase  in  the  race's 
life — the  survival  of  the  unfittest. 

So  at  this  late  day  it  is  absurd  to  allege  a 
contract  with  nature  to  look  out  for  our  racial 
integrity.  The  best  evidence  that  she  will 
not  do  it  is  that  she  never  has  done  it.  Not 
one  of  all  the  preceding  civilizations  has  been 
able  to  survive  its  own  destructive  influences. 
Other  species  proceed  with  an  even  develop- 
ment until,  perhaps,  the  turn  of  a  geological 
age  reverses  living  conditions  and  destroys 
them,  but  a  half-dozen  developments  of  the 
human  race  have  gone  to  pieces  during  the 

32 


BIRTH-RATE  AND  RACE  VALUES 

merest  fraction  of  a  geological  age.  To  be 
sure,  man  survives  physically  and  unim- 
paired, but  man's  development  is  one  of 
brains,  and  of  creations  due  to  brains,  not  of 
physique,  and  his  failures  have  been  failures 
to  maintain  the  quality  of  his  brain,  the  very 
thing  which  he  develops. 

Unless  we  are  able  to  discover  the  cause  of 
these  failures,  and  to  apply  a  remedy,  there 
is  no  ground  for  belief  that  our  civilization 
will  not  eventually  follow  those  which  have 
gone  before. 

Since  we  know  that  racial  values  are  bred, 
not  made,  we  must  look  into  man's  system  of 
breeding  for  both  the  cause  and  the  remedy. 
More  than  likely  we  shall  fairly  agree  as  to 
the  causes  of  racial  decline,  and  still  be  of 
many  minds  over  the  question  of  remedies. 

We  perceive  and  understand  the  effects  of 
breeding  in  animals,  because  the  breed  makes 
the  animal  as  we  see  it — it  is  not  refashioned 
by  environment.  We  scarcely  perceive  or 
understand  the  effects  of  breeding  in  man,  be- 
cause we  succeed  so  well  in  refashioning  him 
into  something  quite  different  from  the  crea- 
ture bred.     Yet  it  is  the  creature  bred  that 

33 


MANKIND 

breeds  again,  that  carries  forward  the  racial 
values,  not  the  thing  that  we  have  fashioned. 
Civilized  man  and  the  animals  differ  widely 
in  their  practice  of  breeding.  Naturally,  then, 
we  should  expect  a  widely  differing  result  in 
genetic  values.  For  instance,  among  animals 
in  the  natural  state,  the  harsh  struggle  for 
existence  eliminates  the  born  weaklings  be- 
fore they  can  reproduce  their  defective  kind. 
We  recognize  this  as  one  of  nature's  methods 
for  maintaining  a  vigorous  species.  Our  hu- 
manity impels  us  to  preserve  the  weak;  and 
while  we  fail  more  frequently  than  not  with 
the  physically  defective — God  be  praised  ! — 
we  succeed  in  coaxing  the  mentally  weak  to 
an  unhappy  maturity,  to  breed  their  infirmity 
with  that  pristine  sexual  vigor  so  character- 
istic of  the  irresponsible.  A  similar  perpetu- 
ating of  defective  strains  among  animals  we 
would  at  once  recognize  as  disastrous.  We 
conceal  the  damage  in  our  own  case  by  mul- 
tiplying almshouses,  institutions,  homes,  and 
all  sorts  of  social  props  for  the  deficient. 
Again,  in  natural  life  the  instinct  for  repro- 
duction presses  more  markedly  upon  the  vig- 
orous and  the  fit,  and  nothing  intervenes  to 

34 


BIRTH-RATE  AND   RACE  VALUES 

divert  it;  the  fittest  are  the  most  proHfic. 
That  instinct  in  man  presses  as  markedly 
upon  the  physically  inclined,  and  gives  us  a 
physically  vigorous  race;  but  the  mentally 
superior  habitually  divert  it  from  its  natural 
function,  and  the  inevitable  result  to  the  race 
is  mental  impoverishment. 

The  world  has  been  worrying  itself  of  late 
about  the  birth-rate — whether  it  is  rising  or 
falling,  in  this  or  that  country — as  if  a  nation's 
strength  depended  on  the  number,  not  the 
quality,  of  its  people.  Yet  the  world  knows 
that  surplus  populations  are  to-day  stifling 
certain  countries,  and  will  eventually  stifle 
others.  The  test  for  survival  is  to  be,  in- 
creasingly, one  of  possessing  the  best  human 
stocky  and  no  more  of  it  than  can  properly  exist. 

The  question  of  rate  of  increase  pales  into 
nothingness  before  the  question  of  what  sort 
of  stock  is  supplying  the  increase.  Since  man 
stands  unique  among  all  living  creatures  for 
capricious  range  of  fecundity,  the  direction  in 
which  his  caprice  is  leading  him  is  of  vital 
importance  to  the  race. 

The  direction  is  evident.  Stocks  of  high 
35 


MANKIND 

genetic  value,  as  measured  by  those  individ- 
uals who  have  attained  more  or  less  eminence, 
are  not  by  any  means  as  prolific  as  those  stocks 
which  are  less  capable,  less  provident,  less 
valuable  to  the  community,  and  of  less  ge- 
netic worth.  This  disproportionate  rate  of 
increase  manifests  itself  in  the  number  of  off- 
spring brought  to  maturity  in  each  genera- 
tion; in  the  frequency  of  the  generations;  and 
in  the  greater  number  of  living  generations 
of  those  who  multiply  more  frequently.  In 
other  words,  the  more  capable  and  provident 
of  a  community  marry  at  a  later  age,  have 
fewer  children,  and  a  less  number  of  genera- 
tions on  earth  at  a  given  time,  than  those 
who  are  less  provident  and  presumably  of  less 
genetic  value.  Thus  all  three  of  these  factors 
operate  together  to  decrease  the  proportion 
of  superior  human  stock  as  represented  in  the 
population. 

This  charge  of  erratic  parenthood  cannot 
be  laid  against  an  entire  people.  Only  in  a 
general  way  are  the  more  prolific  found  among 
the  less  desirable  strains,  and  the  less  prolific 
among  the  better  strains.  Most  excellent 
stock  sometimes  indulges  in  large  families,  and 

36 


BIRTH-RATE  AND  RACE  VALUES 

many  worthless  individuals  leave  no  offspring 
at  all.  To  both  of  these  we  should  be  grate- 
ful as  special  conservators  of  the  race. 

Those  who  should  multiply  and  do  not,  and 
those  who  multiply  grievously  and  should  not, 
will  be  our  concern  in  the  next  two  chapters. 


37 

130513 


CHAPTER   V 
DEFICIENT    INCREASE   OF    THE    SUPERIOR 

THE  SUPERIOR  INHERITANCE — ^THE  AMBITIOUS — THE  IN- 
TELLECTUALS— THE  RICH — WOMEN  AND  RACE  VALUES 
— ^THE  FEMINIST  MOVEMENT — MEN  CHOOSE  INFERIOR 
WOMEN 

THE  exceptionally  desirable  inheritance 
has  already  been  described: 

"It  is  of  that  quality  of  brain — one  might 
almost  add,  quantity  of  brain — which  leads  to 
creative  leadership  in  whatever  activity  it 
may  select.  It  dominates  environment,  and 
advances  into  new  undertakings.  It  is  the 
mark  of  the  social  migrator — the  man  of 
initiative  who  extricates  himself  from  the 
mass  and  changes  some  bit  of  the  world,  for 
better  or  for  worse,  by  his  contact  with  it." 

Leadership  in  the  creative  arts,  in  litera- 
ture, science,  business,  education,  finance, 
statesmanship — in  all  affairs  which  determine 
the  character  of  a  civilization — may  come  to 
inheritances  such  as  this.  But  this  charac- 
teristic is  of  no  single  quality.  It  is  as  well  the 
impelling  force  in  lesser  inheritances,  born, 

38 


DEFICIENT  INCREASE  OF  THE  SUPERIOR 

perhaps,  into  spheres  of  meagre  opportunity, 
yet  recognizable  in  the  man  who  strives  and 
achieves  better  than  his  fellows.  It  follows 
no  lines  of  social  cleavage.  Its  possessor  is 
of  the  kind  that  knocks  unbidden,  and  more 
than  once,  at  opportunity's  gate.  He  may  be 
the  lawyer  who  gains  the  bench,  or  the  clerk 
who  finally  owns  the  store.  He  is  the  one 
man  in  the  ditch  who  becomes  a  boss,  or  the 
boss  who  blossoms  into  a  contractor,  or  the 
contractor  who  afterward  goes  to  Congress 
and  devotes  his  rugged  virtues  to  the  service 
of  his  country.  And  the  newsboy  who  man- 
ages to  get  to  college  and  breaks  away  from 
his  father's  trade  is  a  full-fledged  member  of 
this  well-mixed  fraternity. 

We  say  that  such  men  have  ambition,  as  if 
that  were  a  specific  quality  which  impels  one 
to  endeavor.  Ambition  is  no  more  than  the 
outward  symptom  of  innate  superiority  striv- 
ing to  express  itself.  No  fool  has  ambition, 
except  as  our  educational  system  foists  it 
upon  him  as  a  substitute  for  brains. 

Innate  superiority  is  not  always  easily  rec- 
ognized. Lack  of  opportunity,  or  the  scars 
left  by  long  strife  against  odds,  may  conceal 

39 


MANKIND 

it.  Sometimes  its  manifestations  may  be  dis- 
tinctly antisocial.  But  the  point  to  bear  in 
mind  is  that  imperfectness  of  expression  does 
not  lessen  the  value  of  such  an  inheritance  as 
a  transmitter  of  exceptionally  good  character- 
istics to  future  generations,  in  whom  they  may 
have  better  opportunity  for  development. 

So  from  every  walk  of  life  in  the  cities,  and 
from  towns,  villages,  country — the  great  reser- 
voirs of  unexploited  human  material — come 
the  best  of  their  kind,  impelled  by  their  for- 
tunate inheritances  toward  the  centres  of 
achievement.  This  is  the  phenomenon  of 
leadership,  not  only  in  America,  but  in  every 
civilized  country. 

These  are  indeed  the  stocks  from  which  to 
breed  a  race  of  men.  A  system  of  selective 
breeding  would  choose  just  these — but  selec- 
tive breeding  of  humans  is  away  beyond 
present  attainment.  The  best  that  could  be 
hoped  for  would  be  a  generous  infusion  of 
their  good  blood  into  the  blood  of  the  race. 
Then,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  how  do  they  breed  ? 

They  fulfil  their  racial  duties  less  completely 
than  almost  any  other  set  of  individuals  in 
the  community.     The  stressful,  shifting  con- 

40 


DEFICIENT  INCREASE  OF  THE  SUPERIOR 

ditions  under  which  they  work  out  their 
emergence  are  directly  opposed  to  anything 
in  the  nature  of  a  handicap.  They  are  as  in- 
clined to  marry  as  are  all  normal,  healthy 
people,  and  most  of  them  do  marry,  but  pru- 
dence is  a  dominant  trait  with  them,  and  pru- 
dence suggests  both  a  late  marriage  and  a 
limited  family.  Here,  again,  is  that  doubly 
sure  promoter  of  disproportion  between  hered- 
itary strength  and  hereditary  unfitness.  They 
arrive  at  a  settled  condition  too  late  in  life, 
and  the  economic  problem  is  too  pressing  upon 
most  of  them,  to  admit  of  the  full  and  free 
exercise  of  their  natural  inclinations  with 
regard  to  family. 

Thus  a  civilization  picks  out  the  best  from 
every  part  of  her  human  supply,  leads  it  to 
greater  achievement,  and  to  less  fertility.  It 
does  not  matter  that  these  men  die;  it  does 
matter  that  they  let  their  exceptionally  good 
germ-plasm  die  with  them.  The  loss  of  their 
rich  inheritances,  which  might  have  enriched 
other  inheritances  till  the  end  of  time,  defi- 
nitely impoverishes  the  world's  racial  values. 

Of  course  we  all  know  that  exceptionally 
able  men  often  have  commonplace  children — 

41 


MANKIND 

especially  if  they  have  commonplace  wives, 
as  so  many  able  men  do  who  marry  before 
they  have  emerged.  A  wife  with  poor  inheri- 
tance values  cuts  down  by  half  the  already 
too  meagre  probability  of  a  superior  inheri- 
tance for  the  children.  In  any  case  the  prog- 
eny of  able  parents  tend  to  revert  to  medioc- 
rity, for  the  very  simple  reason  that  all  of  us 
have  much  more  of  mediocrity  than  of  great- 
ness in  our  ancestry,  and  therefore  in  the 
germinal  material  from  which  our  children 
draw  their  inheritances.  But  this  does'  not 
alter  the  fact  that  rich  inheritances  can  come 
only  from  germ-plasm  rich  in  possibilities. 
The  genuineness  of  the  loss  to  the  race  in  the 
cutting  off  of  superior  germ-plasm  is  not  less- 
ened because  it  might  not  always  have  pro- 
duced greatness  in  the  immediate  offspring. 
The  able  man  who  leaves  no  children  deprives 
the  race  of  the  benefit  which  would  come  from 
a  diffusion  of  his  strong  qualities  through  it, 
and  reduces  the  probability  of  future  excep- 
tional inheritances. 

Another  order  of  ability  and  genetic  values 
well  above  the  average  might  be  taken  to  in- 

42 


DEFICIENT  INCREASE  OF  THE  SUPERIOR 

dude  the  culture  and  intellectual  refinement 
of  the  community — more  particularly  repre- 
sented among  educators,  statesmen,  writers, 
jurists,  physicians,  scientists,  editors,  preach- 
ers, artists  of  various  sorts — and  all  the  like 
whose  abilities  are  more  directly  and  ostensi- 
bly employed  for  the  well-being  of  society,  in 
controlling  its  affairs,  in  shaping  its  thought 
and  cultivating  its  tastes,  rather  than  in  seek- 
ing personal  advantage.  They  are  character- 
ized by  a  pervading  sense  of  social  obligation, 
a  more  or  less  unconscious  altruism  that  leads 
them  to  accept  satisfaction  with  good  work 
done  as  a  conspicuous  part  of  their  reward. 

This  describes  the  most  honorable,  effec- 
tive, and  altogether  important  group  in  the 
community  life.  They  are  the  leaven  in  the 
social  lump.  They  shape  the  social  structure 
in  which  we  live  and  move  and  have  our  being, 
the  most  of  us  too  unimaginative,  too  pre- 
occupied, to  perceive  that  we  do  not  build  it 
ourselves. 

Conspicuous  financial  success  comes  to  very 
few  of  these,  and  when  it  does  it  comes  late. 
Society  in  every  country  of  high  culture  is 
content  to  let  this  very  valuable  source  of 

43 


MANKIND 

genetic  material  undertake  the  rearing  of 
families  under  economic  burdens  such  as  do 
not  press  upon  any  other  worthy  group  in  a 
community.  To  begin  with,  long  years  of 
preparation,  then  longer  years  before  a  fair 
measure  of  success  is  attained,  tend  to  post- 
pone marriage,  with  the  inevitable  lengthen- 
ing of  the  span  between  generations,  and  cur- 
tailment of  family.  And  all  the  time  their 
many  close  contacts  with  those  of  more  lib- 
eral means  require  them  to  possess  the  extra 
trappings  of  good  living  which  their  own  re- 
finement and  good  taste  make  them  long  for. 
Incomes,  to  be  sure,  are  well  above  the  aver- 
age, but  not  as  well  above  the  average  as  are 
their  position  and  requirements.  Many  a 
thrifty  artisan  can  save  a  better  competence. 
Even  their  very  earnestness  to  give  the  best 
they  have  in  them  to  their  chosen  work  leads 
them  away  from  the  handicap  of  a  large 
family.  They  wish,  also,  to  give  their  chil- 
dren the  best  things  in  home,  nurture,  and 
education — and  the  smaller  the  family  the 
more  they  can  give. 

One  could  hardly  erect  a  more  formidable 
barrier  against  the  rearing  of  a  large  family. 

44 


DEFICIENT  INCREASE  OF  THE  SUPERIOR 

Any  observer  who  compares  even  casually  the 
unthinking  fecundity  of  the  masses  with  this 
studied  effort  of  our  intellectuals  to  make 
financial  ends  meet,  knows  that  they  fail  ade- 
quately to  perpetuate  their  superior  heritages. 
They  constitute  another  vitally  important 
group  that  absorbs  more  of  the  world's  best 
stocks  than  it  returns  to  them.  The  failure 
of  the  intellectuals  of  Europe  in  this  respect 
is  as  ominous  as  with  us,  although  the  astound- 
ing fertility  of  our  labor  immigrants  stands 
out  in  more  vivid  contrast  against  the  infer- 
tility of  the  effective  American  stocks.  We, 
in  the  Eastern  States  at  least,  are  being  liter- 
ally bred  off  the  earth. 

The  fortunate — or  unfortunate,  as  often 
happens — members  of  a  community  who  are 
loosely  described  as  "the  rich"  are  most  di- 
rectly under  popular  suspicion  of  indifference 
to  racial  duties.  (Of  course  all  these  classifi- 
cations are  quite  arbitrary,  overlap  one  an- 
other more  or  less,  and  are  made  only  to  facili- 
tate this  brief  comparative  study  of  genetic 
values  and  fecundity.) 

Possessors  of  wealth  are  of  two  distinct 
45 


MANKIND 

sorts — the  builders  of  fortunes,  and  the  in- 
heritors of  fortunes.  First,  we  will  examine 
the  builders. 

None  but  the  well-balanced,  alert,  compre- 
hending mind,  set  in  a  vigorous  and  healthy- 
body,  can  perceive  and  develop  opportunity 
and  sustain  the  degree  of  physical  and  mental 
concentration  necessary  for  the  management 
of  large  affairs.  These  are  the  substantial 
qualities  of  inheritance  which,  if  not  turned  to 
money-making  by  a  particular  bent — or  per- 
haps by  mere  circumstance — might  easily  lead 
their  possessor  to  eminence  in  other  spheres  of 
leadership  not  so  strictly  measured  by  dollars 
and  cents.  Many  great  money-makers  dem- 
onstrate their  bigness  of  personality  by  attain- 
ing distinct  success  and  public  usefulness  in 
affairs  quite  apart  from  their  main  occupa- 
tion. To  be  sure,  some  fortunes  seem  to 
grow  out  of  a  sheer  chance  from  the  skies, 
followed  up  by  a  narrow,  stingy  persistence, 
but  these  are  the  exceptions.  Bigness  of 
action,  and  a  certain  dependableness  of  char- 
acter, are  among  the  parts  of  most  great 
builders  of  wealth. 

It  goes  without  saying  that  the  race  could 
46 


DEFICIENT  INCREASE  OF  THE   SUPERIOR 

hardly  receive  a  more  valuable  legacy  than  a 
generous  perpetuation  of  heritages  such  as 
these.  But  builders  of  fortunes  are  for  the 
most  part  self-made  men — "social  migrators" 
— beset  throughout  their  early  years  by  the 
migrator's  temptations  to  forego  the  encum- 
brance of  a  family  during  the  struggle  for 
success.  We  have  already  gone  into  the 
shortcomings  of  the  exceptionally  endowed 
with  respect  to  racial  duties.  A  glance  at  his 
two,  one,  or  none,  as  against  the  six  or  eight 
offspring  of  the  ubiquitous,  happy-go-lucky 
improvident,  will  reveal  the  small  part  that 
his  rich  heritage  has  in  perpetuating  racial 
values. 

The  fortune-builder's  children,  and  theirs  in 
turn — the  inheritors  of  wealth — get  their  view 
of  life  from  a  very  different  angle.  No  class 
in  the  community  has  less  incentive  to  be 
really  useful  and  more  incentive  to  be  worse 
than  useless.  Inherited  wealth,  in  its  way,  is 
a  more  fiery  ordeal  for  character  than  pov- 
erty. It  picks  out  much  of  its  own  bad  blood 
and  sends  it  to  profligacy.  Bad  stock  thus 
partially  disappears  from  the  ranks  of  wealth. 
Most  important,  too,  for  the  enrichment  of 

47 


MANKIND 

its  blood,  wealth's  effective  appeal  to  the  am- 
bitious of  lesser  affluence  gives  it  the  pick  of 
matings  from  the  superior  stocks  of  the  com- 
munity. 

Then,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  one  of  the 
most  obvious  and  every-day  of  social  phe- 
nomena is  that  of  money  sustaining  myriads 
of  people  in  positions  to  which  their  innate 
capacities  would  never  have  raised  them,  it 
must  be  admitted  that  a  high  proportion  of 
exceptionally  good  stock  is  lodged  with  in- 
herited riches.  The  lack  of  necessity  and  am- 
bition to  do  things  puts  much  of  it  on  the 
dilettante  shelf,  but  that  does  not  lessen  its 
genetic  value.  We  could  forgive  inherited 
wealth  for  becoming  the  burying-ground  for 
a  large  portion  of  the  talent  which  succeeds 
in  getting  under  its  ample  roof,  if  it  would 
only  pass  on  in  good  measure  its  unusual  in- 
heritance values — for  wealth  becomes  redis- 
tributed, while  good  blood  survives,  and  in 
later  generations  might  give  a  good  account 
of  itself. 

No  one  pretends  that  the  offspring  of  the 
rich  compare  in  numbers  with  those  of  any 
other  considerable   group;   neither  does  the 

48 


DEFICIENT  INCREASE  OF  THE  SUPERIOR 

greater  proportion  of  survivals  make  up  for 
the  deficiency.  But  there  is  this  to  be  said 
in  their  favor:  among  the  inheritors  of  riches 
it  is  the  substantial,  the  superior  in  character, 
who  have  the  larger  families.  They  are  free 
from  the  economic  considerations  and  the  de- 
mands of  ambition  which  beset  the  family 
desires  of  the  worthy  in  every  other  group. 
It  is  a  curious  fact  that  the  rich,  by  sending 
many  of  their  worst  to  an  unfertile  life  and 
by  breeding  more  numerously  from  their  best 
stocks,  follow  more  closely  the  scheme  of  na- 
ture for  conserving  hereditary  values  than  any 
other  group  in  the  community.  But  they  fol- 
low it  so  gingerly,  and  so  many  of  them  not 
at  all,  that  they  do  not  maintain  their  num- 
bers on  a  parity  with  the  average.  The  silent 
streets  of  the  rich  proclaim  the  death  of  germ- 
plasm  that  should  have  been  perpetuated. 

Little  has  been  said  of  woman's  part  in 
sustaining  racial  values.  The  major  part 
taken  by  men  in  the  conduct  of  affairs,  and 
the  more  obvious  relation  of  men's  abilities  to 
the  world's  progress,  are  responsible  for  this. 
But  women  have  equal  part  with  men  in  de- 

49 


MANKIND 

termining  the  inheritances  of  their  children  of 
both  sexes.  A  woman  may  convey  mascuHne 
traits  from  her  male  progenitors  to  her  male 
offspring  which  do  not  appear  in  her  own  in- 
heritance; that  is,  a  woman  inherits  neither 
the  physical  nor  the  mental  texture  of  a  man, 
although  she  may  transmit  both.  The  women 
of  a  line  will  reproduce  for  generations  the 
heavy  beards,  hairy,  muscular  forms,  and 
masculine  habits  of  mind  of  their  males,  while 
they  themselves  remain  womanly  in  physique 
and  manner  of  thinking.  Conversely — to  be 
more  convincing  and  strictly  impartial — the 
feminine  characteristics  of  a  line  may  be  car- 
ried down  through  the  males,  but  not  a  male 
among  them  will  have  in  his  own  being  those 
finer  attributes  of  physique,  or  the  delicate 
alertness  of  thought,  the  intuitive  penetra- 
tion, the  exquisite  quality  of  love  for  off- 
spring, which  make  the  glory  of  womanhood. 
The  law  of  inheritance  for  men  and  women 
does  not  raise  the  question  of  equality;  it 
states  the  fact  of  mental  and  physical  differ- 
ences so  impassable  that  men  and  women  can- 
not be  measured  against  each  other.  Certain 
women,   whose   feminine    characteristics   are 

so 


DEFICIENT  INCREASE  OF  THE  SUPERIOR 

more  or  less  obscure,  deem  it  their  business  in 
life  to  proclaim  the  equahty  of  the  sexes. 
This  is  an  innocuous  phrase  as  appHed  to  two 
complementary  beings,  both  equally  essential 
for  a  complete  demonstration  of  human  attri- 
butes. Then,  in  dense  ignorance  of  the  limi- 
tations imposed  by  inheritance,  they  proceed 
to  mistake  equality  for  similarity.  They  con- 
vince themselves,  and  also  many  sincere,  esti- 
mable women  who  vaguely  comprehend  their 
real  and  just  grievance  against  social  condi- 
tions, that  women  are  held  from  doing  man's 
part  in  the  world's  affairs  only  by  long  habit, 
prejudice,  lack  of  opportunity  and  training. 

While  there  is  much  to  be  commended  in 
the  feminist  movement,  particularly  in  its 
aspirations  for  a  more  equitable  share  in  po- 
litical and  legal  rights,  it  must  be  said  that  in 
many  of  its  essential  aims,  and  so  far  in  most 
of  its  attainments,  it  is  a  movement  away 
from  motherhood  and  toward  the  chimerical 
idea  that  woman  must  prove  her  equal  worth 
by  doing  man's  work.  These  poorly  guided 
women  miss  the  wide  difference  that  lies  be- 
tween transmitting  a  trait  down  the  family 
line  and  inheriting  it  themselves.     Men  might 

SI 


MANKIND 

as  reasonably  assert  that,  because  they  can 
transmit  the  glorious  feminine  endowments  of 
their  mothers  to  their  daughters,  they  must 
have  the  same  traits  somewhere  concealed 
within  their  own  make-up.  But  a  man  who 
sets  out  to  imitate  the  qualities  of  womanhood 
is  regarded  as  a  sexual  mistake. 

Present  economic  conditions  will  hold  many 
women  to  tasks  which  are  not  wholly  of  their 
own  choosing,  and  full  opportunity  to  work 
under  satisfactory  conditions  is  no  more  than 
their  just  due;  but  society  would  be  relieved 
of  a  racial  menace  if  the  economically  inde- 
pendent women  bent  on  demonstrating  the 
equality  of  the  sexes  could  be  made  to  com- 
prehend their  equal  responsibility  with  men 
for  supplying  good  racial  material  to  future 
generations,  and  the  small  responsibility  of 
either  men  or  women  for  the  conduct  of  those 
affairs  for  which  the  other's  qualities  are  pe- 
culiarly fit.  Their  conversion  might  turn  back 
the  best  of  them  to  their  more  natural  func- 
tion, to  the  everlasting  benefit  of  the  race. 
For  it  is  just  such  women  as  these — strong- 
minded,  capable,  with  initiative  that  reveals 
itself  in  protest — who  are  the  potential  moth- 
ers of  a  great  race. 

52 


DEFICIENT  INCREASE  OF  THE  SUPERIOR 

Another  serious  loss  to  the  race  of  most 
excellent  potential  motherhood  is  chargeable 
almost  wholly  to  man.  From  a  racial  view- 
point, a  man  chooses  his  mate  poorly.  To  be 
sure,  he  seeks  fine  qualities  of  mind  in  the 
woman  he  wishes  to  marry,  but  he  also  de- 
mands other  attractions  in  her  which  fre- 
quently are  at  variance  with  those  qualities. 
He  is  attracted  by  smoothness  of  contour  and 
delicacy  of  features,  both  clearly  indicative  of 
simplicity  of  intellectual  endowment.  Curve 
of  eyebrow,  beauty  of  hair,  teeth  and  figure 
and  color  of  cheek  are  strong  matrimonial 
assets  which  may,  or  may  not,  be  associated 
with  genetic  worth.  The  eye  expressive  of 
high  intelligence  is  not  so  fascinating  as  the 
dreamy,  limpid  eye  expressive  of  sensuous 
mediocrity.  Men  set  great  store  by  sweet- 
ness of  disposition,  but  few  of  them  use 
their  calm  judgment  in  choosing  between  the 
woman  of  intelligent  common  sense,  who  will 
meet  the  trials  of  life  with  cheerful  adapta- 
bility, and  the  amiable  creature  whose  placid 
non-resistance  settles  under  adversity  into  a 
peevish  discontent. 

While  hardly  aware  of  it  in  most  instances, 
men  are  inclined  toward  women  of  inferior 

S3 


MANKIND 

genetic  possibilities  because  they  meet  the 
more  insistent  surface  requirements.  For  that 
reason  we  have  great  numbers  of  able  men 
married  to  decidedly  inferior  women.  This 
damage  to  race  values  is  vastly  more  serious 
than  is  usually  realized.  The  heritages  of  the 
children  are  cut  down  more  than  half-way  to 
that  of  the  inferior  mother,  while  the  superior 
women  who  could  have  enriched  the  race  carry 
their  lines  to  extinction.  We  all  know  of 
many  unmarried  women,  especially  daughters 
of  men  of  exceptional  ability,  whose  fine  in- 
heritances are  shown  in  strength  of  features, 
in  vigor  and  independence  of  mind — the  very 
qualities  which  have  turned  men  from  them. 
The  abler  women,  too,  are  now  so  little  de- 
pendent upon  marriage  for  a  living  that  they 
are  inclined  to  wait  for  the  man  who  measures 
up  to  their  ideals,  and  their  inclination  carries 
them  too  often  into  confirmed  spinsterhood. 

It  is  lamentably  true  that  many  of  these 
most  excellent  women  could  not  be,  as  wives, 
so  companionable  and  altogether  satisfying  as 
some  other  women  who  have  extremely  little 
of  racial  value  to  give  to  their  children.  Wife- 
hood involves  more  than  motherhood,  and  it 

54 


DEFICIENT  INCREASE  OF  THE  SUPERIOR 

seems  hardly  just  to  fix  the  whole  responsi- 
bility upon  men;  yet  the  poignant  fact  re- 
mains that  many  a  great  man  will  never  be 
born  because  his  potential  mother  could  not 
measure  down  to  the  man-made  ideal  of  a 
wife. 

In  these  various  ways  and  in  others  which 
are  more  or  less  closely  related  to  them,  civil- 
ization ever3rwhere  tends  to  extinguish  the 
very  stocks  upon  which  its  greatness  depends. 
In  the  clear  light  of  our  present  knowledge 
that  education,  training,  social  work,  can  no 
more  stay  the  effects  of  breeding  than  stop 
the  wind  that  blows,  we  see  that  this  deficit 
in  superior  human  material  can  be  made  good 
only  by  replacement  from  other  stocks — and 
at  the  expense,  in  turn,  of  the  genetic  values 
in  those  stocks.  The  replacement  of  these 
destroyed  racial  values,  and  the  reservoirs  of 
human  supply  from  which  fresh  stocks  are 
drawn,  are  the  crux  of  this  study,  and  will  be 
dealt  with  in  a  later  chapter. 

From  the  opposite  direction  another  power- 
ful factor  works  toward  the  depreciation  of 
racial  values — the  rapid,  uncontrolled  multi- 

55 


MANKIND 

plication  of  the  masses  who  are  so  far  below 
a  fair  average  of  social  worth  that  they  en- 
cumber society  more  than  they  assist  it. 
They  do  not  threaten  progress  as  seriously, 
perhaps,  as  the  destruction  of  the  superior 
stocks,  since  the  height  of  a  civilization  is 
measured  wholly  by  the  achievements  of  its 
great  men,  but  they  are  more  disturbing  to 
the  social  structure  on  which  a  civilization 
must  rest.  These  men  and  women  deserve 
careful  study. 


S6 


CHAPTER  VI 
EXCESSIVE  INCREASE  OF  THE  INFERIOR 

THE  OBVIOUSLY  DEFECTIVE — ^THE  INEFFECTIVE — THEIR 
PARTS  SOCIALLY  AND  INDUSTRIALLY — SUBNORMAL 
W^OMEN  —  SPREADING  DEFECT  UPWARD  —  PHILAN- 
THROPY  ASSISTS    INCREASE 

A  WELL-FOUND  ED  optimism  prevails 
among  workers  for  social  betterment 
with  respect  to  the  problem  of  the  most  obvi- 
ously defective — the  idiotic,  imbecile,  feeble- 
minded, insane,  and  epileptic.  Permanent 
custodial  care,  to  give  them  the  little  happi- 
ness that  can  come  into  their  lives,  and  to 
stop  their  prolific  reproduction  of  their  own 
miserable  kind,  offers  a  clear  way  out  from 
under  a  rapidly  increasing  social  burden. 

A  good  beginning  has  been  made,  but  even 
with  the  bright  prospect  of  cutting  off  this 
fertile  source  of  human  misery  and  racial  cor- 
ruption, scarcely  a  State  in  the  Union  has 
provided  for  more  than  one-fourth  of  its 
recognized    defectives.     Still,    the    fight    for 

57 


MANKIND 

segregation  eventually  will  be  won,  and,  with 
the  case  resting  in  most  able  hands,  we  may 
go  the  length  of  assuming  an  early  and  ma- 
terial relief  from  this  particular  social  dis- 
order. The  remedy  is  obvious,  and  its  more 
complete  application  awaits  a  slow-moving 
public  opinion. 

This  most  talked-of  group  is  dismissed  with 
a  paragraph  in  order  to  take  up  the  more 
subtle  and  altogether  baffling  menace  of  the 
semidependants,  who  range  from  just  above 
the  custodial  grade  to  the  lower  fringes  of  in- 
dustrial life.  The  conditions  in  this  group  are 
greatly  complicated  by  our  immense  foreign 
immigration.  The  immigrant  will  have  at- 
tention in  another  chapter.  It  is  not  the  in- 
tention to  include  now  those  of  the  foreign- 
born  whose  deficiency  is  rightly  chargeable  to 
their  special  handicap,  nor  the  worthy  who 
have  been  brought  to  dependence  through  mis- 
fortune. Excluding  these,  there  is  still  a  vast 
army  in  the  border-land  which  lies  between 
complete  helplessness  and  a  really  useful  place 
in  society,  whose  trouble  may  be  described  in 
three  words:  ineffective  mental  equipment. 
As  distinguished  from  more  clearly  recognized 

58 


EXCESSIVE  INCREASE  OF  THE  INFERIOR 

defectives,  they  may  well  be  called  "ineffec- 
tives." 

For  the  problem  set  us  by  these  men  and 
women  there  is  no  solution  in  sight.  They 
cannot  by  any  stretch  of  public  sentiment  be 
permanently  separated  from  the  privileges  of 
''citizenship  and  parenthood,  and  they  cannot 
with  their  meagre  abilities  meet  with  reason- 
able continuity  the  simplest  requirements  of 
good  citizenship  and  good  parenthood. 

We  find  these  ineflfectives  everywhere. 
Steadfastness  of  action  or  of  purpose  is  not 
in  them.  They  may  spend  their  lives  within 
a  stone's  throw  of  opportunity  and  never 
meet  it.  In  their  lower  grades  are  the  alco- 
holics, dope-fiends,  loafers,  tramps,  petty  of- 
fenders— and  petty  workers  when  not  offend- 
ing. Social  order,  with  its  simple  demands 
for  individual  adjustment,  does  not  appeal  to 
them  because  they  can  comprehend  so  little 
that  is  beyond  their  own  instincts.  They  get 
religion  in  the  mission  and  lose  it  in  the  saloon. 

So  they  drift  about  between  feeble  efforts 
at  making  a  living  and  chronic  entanglement 
with  the  law;  filling  the  criminal  courts,  jails, 
almshouses,  and  public  institutions  generally. 

59 


MANKIND 

This  class  engages  three-fourths  of  our  enor- 
mous corrective  and  philanthropic  machinery, 
and  much  of  it  can  be  sure  of  keeping  out  of 
jail  only  when  it  is  in  the  lap  of  charity. 

This  is  merely  descriptive  of  society's  most 
puzzling  group.  More  to  the  point  is  the  fact 
that  these  men  and  women  are  notoriously 
prolific,  with  respect  to  both  legitimate  and 
illegitimate  offspring.  Their  sex  instincts  are 
uppermost  from  early  youth.  It  is  their  one 
steadily  persistent  and  vigorous  characteristic. 
They  have  not  the  ordinary  discretion  of  the 
humblest  among  those  who  try  to  merit  the 
respect  of  society.  Many  begin  their  careers 
with  a  record  of  illegitimacy,  and  end  with 
large  families  which  they  do  not  even  pretend 
adequately  to  support.  People  of  this  mental 
grade  are  no  more  constant  in  their  marital 
relations  than  in  any  other.  Their  succes- 
sive matings  as  they  roam  about,  and  the 
promiscuity  of  married  and  unmarried,  com- 
bine to  produce  an  incredible  number  of  chil- 
dren. 

The  women  of  these  high-grade  subnormals 
are  as  ill-fitted  to  the  social  scheme  as  the 
men,  and  from  a  racial  point  of  view  are  in- 

60 


EXCESSIVE  INCREASE  OF  THE  INFERIOR 

finitely  more  damaging.  Investigations  in 
New  York,  Chicago,  and  other  large  cities 
have  shown  mental  incapacity  to  be  the  out- 
standing cause  of  prostitution  and  persistent 
bearing  of  illegitimate  children;  yet  most  of 
these  women  are  above  the  custodial  grade. 

It  is  with  a  fine  regard  for  the  universal 
frailty  of  mankind  that  we  judge  somewhat 
leniently  the  woman  who,  under  the  stress  of 
her  unsophisticated  affections,  makes  one  seri- 
ous mistake;  but  there  is  something  positively 
grotesque  in  society's  method  of  handling  sub- 
normal women  who  continue  to  multiply  their 
defective  heritages.  These  women  have  been 
known  to  return  again  and  again  to  free  ma- 
ternity institutions — five,  eight,  and  as  many 
as  fourteen  times.  Were  a  foolish  woman  to 
leave  a  banana  peel  on  the  sidewalk  she 
would  be  prosecuted,  but  she  may  leave  a 
string  of  defective  children,  one  after  another, 
to  plague  society  forever  afterward,  and  not 
only  go  free,  but  each  time  the  State's  doctors 
and  nurses  stand  ready  to  assist  her  as  at  a 
holy  function.  And  each  time  she  is  turned 
loose  upon  society,  because  "she  can  support 
herself" ! 

6i 


MANKIND 

In  another  way  these  women  inflict  a  most 
insidious  damage  upon  the  race.  If  they 
were  to  confine  their  matings  with  those  of 
their  own  kind,  it  would  be  merely  the  case 
of  unfitness  multiplying  unfitness;  but  a  good 
many  of  these  women  are  of  attractive  per- 
sonality, and  in  their  youth  the  very  lack  of 
mentality  gives  to  their  features  a  placid  ap- 
peal which  attracts  normal  men.  Sometimes 
these  infatuations  result  in  marriage — more 
often  they  do  not;  but  in  either  case  this  in- 
termixture of  good  and  bad  blood  produces  a 
degraded  offspring.  The  disastrous  spread  of 
hereditary  mental  defects  through  the  better 
stocks  is  due  almost  wholly  to  matings  be- 
tween normal  men  and  mentally  weak  women 
— rarely  to  matings  of  feeble-minded  men 
with  normal  women. 

Again,  the  careless  promiscuity  of  these 
women  accounts  for  the  wide  prevalence  of 
venereal  disease  among  themselves,  and  the 
illicit  incursions  of  men  of  better  heritage 
spread  the  infection  upward,  with  excruciating 
injustice  to  the  good  women  whom  they 
marry,  and  with  horrible  consequences  to  their 
children  and  to  the  race.     It  will  be  recalled 

62 


EXCESSIVE  INCREASE  OF  THE  INFERIOR 

that  venereal  disease  Is  one  of  the  few  ac- 
quirements of  man  which  act  directly  upon 
the  germ-plasm. 

A  study  of  racial  values  should  not  presume 
to  pass  upon  the  merits  and  demerits  of  social 
institutions,  but  it  is  bound  to  set  forth  every 
kind  of  influence  which  bears  upon  those 
values,  even  if  the  good  intentions  of  social 
organizations  are  involved.  Unfortunately, 
these  good  intentions  do  happen  to  aggravate 
in  several  respects  this  menace  of  the  mentally 
ill-equipped. 

Our  new  knowledge  of  hygiene  and  new 
methods  of  preventing  infant  mortality  have 
naturally  achieved  their  most  conspicuous  re- 
sults among  those  who  have  hitherto  suffered 
the  highest  death-rate  because  of  slovenly  im- 
providence, neglect  of  the  most  obvious  rules 
of  sanitation,  and  general  unintelligence  In  the 
care  of  children.  There  is  in  this  no  implica- 
tion that  we  should  do  otherwise  than  extend 
succor  to  all  children  in  the  community  alike; 
there  is  simply  the  fact  that  the  great 
campaign  for  saving  infant  lives  does  most 
of  its  saving  in  the  very  class  which  is  del- 

63 


MANKIND 

uging  us  with  worthless  human  stock.  It 
has  augmented  their  already  disproportionate 
rate  of  increase  by  a  very  considerable  per 
cent. 

Individuals  above  the  grade  of  those  com- 
mitted to  the  public  charge  as  defectives,  or 
recognized  as  committable,  cannot  be  further 
classified  in  the  distribution  of  public  bene- 
fits. Opportunities  for  relief  of  every  de- 
scription are  open  pretty  much  alike  to  those 
of  deserving  qualities  who  are  under  special  or 
temporary  misfortune,  down  to  those  who  can 
never  be  fitted  into  a  worthy  niche  in  the 
social  scheme  and  held  there.  So  charity  has 
drifted  almost  unconsciously  beyond  its  in- 
tended function  of  repairing  social  injustices 
and  relieving  workers  in  distress,  to  a  tremen- 
dous expenditure  of  social  effort  upon  the 
habitually  non-supporting.  Free  material  re- 
lief, free  dispensaries,  free  hospitals,  free  den- 
tistry, free  attendance  on  maternity  cases, 
free  district  nurses,  free  shelters  and  aids  of 
every  description — these  are  righteous  gifts  of 
humanity  to  the  worthy  unfortunate,  but 
these  in  such  profusion  as  we  have  them  did 
not  come  into  existence  to  care  for  the  worthy 

64 


EXCESSIVE  INCREASE  OF  THE   INFERIOR 

unfortunate,  or  even  to  meet  the  imperfec- 
tions of  our  social  system,  as  so  many  like  to 
believe.  Their  chief  business  is  with  those 
who  are  habitually  below  the  level  of  self- 
support  because  of  hopeless  mental  inferiority. 
The  net  result,  then,  is  every  conceivable  form 
of  charity  for  the  relief  of  every  conceivable 
form  of  inconvenience  which  may  overtake 
these  people,  from  illegitimate  children  to  old 
age. 

This  is  not  said  in  criticism.  If  society  can 
devise  no  method  for  eliminating  its  enormous 
"border-line"  population,  it  must  take  upon 
itself  a  part  of  the  functions  which  it  expects 
the  normal  family  to  assume.  The  condition 
is  stated  because  nearly  all  of  these  social 
props  for  the  deficient  ease  the  way  for  the 
rapid  multiplication  of  hereditary  unfitness. 
It  is  a  very  pretty  thing  to  say  that  nobody 
shall  suff^er  for  lack  of  food  and  clothing,  but 
the  consciousness  that  nobody  will  be  per- 
mitted to  suffer  frees  many  a  shiftless  man 
and  woman  from  what  little  compunction 
they  may  have  in  producing  offspring  away 
beyond  their  ability  to  care  for.  They  breed 
with  the   cheerful   certainty  that   they  and 

6S 


MANKIND 

their  oflfspring  will  be  looked  after  somehow. 
The  element  of  fitness  has  little  part  in  deter- 
mining the  survival  of  their  weaklings.  Many 
a  worthy  family  endures  in  secret  far  greater 
privation  and  suffering  than  would  send  these 
people  scurrying  to  the  cover  of  charitable 
rehef.  Facilities  for  better  living,  rightly  cal- 
culated to  improve  their  citizenship,  enable 
more  of  the  unfit  to  marry,  and  insure  the 
survival  of  their  ineffective  children. 

It  is  significant  that  semidependants  are  in 
greater  numbers  in  what  might  be  termed  the 
higher  grades  of  incompetency.  In  other 
words,  the  further  removed  they  are  from  any 
possibility  of  inclusion  in  the  committable 
grade,  the  more  there  are  of  them.  They 
reach  their  greatest  numerical  strength  among 
the  intermittent  workers,  the  odd-job  seekers, 
the  men  and  women  who  flit  in  and  out  of 
industry,  unskilled  and  unwanted.  The  ris- 
ing demand  of  industrial  life  upon  the  quality 
of  the  individual  discloses  incapacity  which 
has  heretofore  ''got  by,'*  and  adds  its  num- 
bers to  the  prolific  natural  increase. 

To  be  sure,  the  handicaps  of  foreign  birth, 
66 


EXCESSIVE  INCREASE  OF  THE  INFERIOR 

poor  environment,  and  physical  defect  account 
for  some  of  the  ineffectives,  but  they  do  not 
account  for  the  slovenly  ineptitude,  the  indif- 
ference to  instruction,  the  lack  of  persistent 
effort  to  make  good,  which  send  nine-tenths 
of  all  ineffectives  on  their  pathetic  wanderings 
through  the  lower  grades  of  industry. 

Just  as  we  have  learned  that  alcoholism 
and  habitual  criminality  are  due  mainly  to  de- 
fective mental  inheritance,  we  are  now  learn- 
ing that  ineptitude,  indifference  and  shifti- 
ness which  persist  in  the  midst  of  reason- 
able opportunity  are  due  mainly  to  a  similar 
ineffective  mental  equipment.  In  justice  to 
itself  society  is  bound  to  provide  fair  condi- 
tions for  the  self-development  of  every  indi- 
vidual; in  no  other  way  can  innate  capacity 
and  innate  incapacity  be  correctly  disclosed. 
But  this  does  not  imply  that  one  who  has 
spent  years  within  reach  of  the  advantages 
offered  in  a  country  like  America  must  be 
led  up  by  the  hand  to  each  of  the  essentials 
for  the  making  of  good  citizenship.  We  are 
coming  to  recognize  conspicuous  lack  of  initia- 
tive as  a  sign  of  mental  inferiority.  A  man 
who  cannot  scent  opportunity  through  a  few 

67 


MANKIND 

obstacles  and  go  after  it  has  something  wrong 
with  his  make-up. 

So  the  army  of  the  poorly  endowed  grows 
in  every  civilized  land,  by  addition  as  new 
incompetency  is  revealed,  and  by  its  own 
rapid  multiplication;  and  to  this  level  the 
human  precipitate  from  every  degenerative 
influence  in  civilization  eventually  settles.  It 
is  a  menace  already  of  huge  proportions,  if  we 
did  but  know  it.  But  we  succeed  well  in 
America  in  covering  the  extent  and  rapidity 
of  its  growth  with  soothing  draughts  of  char- 
ity. England's  ineffectives  have  multiplied 
beyond  the  possibility  of  concealment.  And 
most  of  us  rather  like  to  remain  blind  to  the 
increasing  proportion  of  poor  human  material. 
Human  interest  centres  upon  vigor,  strength, 
achievement.  Its  back  is  toward  those  who 
fail  to  achieve — until,  perhaps,  their  sheer 
force  of  numbers  brings  them  into  unpleasant 
view. 

As  one  reviews  the  latter  days  of  the  Roman 
Empire,  and  reads  of  the  many  devices  in  the 
way  of  public  entertainments  for  amusing  and 
controlling  the  hordes  of  the  unsocial  who  had 

68 


EXCESSIVE   INCREASE  OF  THE  INFERIOR 

accumulated  most  grievously,  the  question 
arises,  How  soon  will  we  arrive  at  the  time 
when  our  own  unsocial  masses  shall  have  be- 
come unwieldy  ?  One  thing  is  certain;  our 
more  humanitarian  methods  are  bringing  the 
fateful  day  upon  us  at  a  more  rapid  rate. 
The  principle  of  the  survival  of  the  fittest  had 
not  been  in  Roman  days  so  completely  sup- 
planted by  the  principle  of  the  survival  of 
the  unfittest.  And  we  are  going  ahead  with 
the  knowledge  whicli  the  Romans  did  not 
have,  that  neither  diversion  nor  punishment 
of  the  ineffective,  unsocial  individual  can  have 
the  slightest  permanent  effect  against  the 
dangerous  qualities  which  he  is  breeding  into 
the  race. 


69 


CHAPTER  VII 
EFFECTS  OF  DISPROPORTIONATE  INCREASE 

INEFFECTIVES  CLOG  SOCIAL  MACHINE — INFERTILITY  OF 
SUPERIOR  MORE  VITAL — CIVILIZATION  DEPENDENT 
UPON  INFLUX  OF  ABILITY — ^THE  SIGNS  OF  DECADENCE 
— CRITICAL  DISPROPORTION  BETWEEN  EFFECTIVES  AND 
INEFFECTIVES — RACIAL  DECLINE  PRECEDES  DEFEAT 
AT   ARMS 

IN  the  two  preceding  cnapters  the  range  of 
human  breeding  has  been  gone  over,  from 
the  best  to  the  worst  of  it.  If  the  racial  factor 
seems  to  have  been  brought  into  unwarranted 
rehef  from  among  the  many  other  factors 
which  enter  into  the  making  of  social  condi- 
tions, it  must  be  remembered  that  this  picture 
is  intended  to  show  our  breeding  system  clear 
of  the  environmental  devices  which  we  have 
set  up  about  it.  Since  cultural  progress  and 
racial  progress  run  in  separate  courses,  sepa- 
rate treatment  of  them  is  justified.  Failure  to 
comprehend  this  separateness  has  kept  us  to 
the  cultural  view  of  progress,  and  away  from 
a  proper  racial  consciousness.  We  are  in 
blissful  ignorance  of  the  fact  that  while  civil- 

70 


EFFECTS  OF  DISPROPORTIONATE  INCREASE 

izatlon  makes  great  display  of  the  individual, 
it  steadily  unmakes  as  much  of  racial  values/ 
as  it  can  lay  hands  on. 

Over-supply  of  inferior  stocks  and  under- 
supply  of  superior  stocks  have  widely  differ- 
ing effects  in  the  destructive  process. 

The  clogging  of  the  social  machine  with  in- 
effective humans  makes  its  smooth  running 
impossible  and  an  ideal  social  and  political 
state  a  fantastic  dream;  yet  so  long  as  their 
numbers  are  not  sufficient  to  bring  about  so- 
cial chaos,  and  industry  keeps  on  its  feet 
under  its  increasing  load  of  workers  who  are 
held  face  to  the  front  by  a  prod  at  the  back, 
this  section  of  the  human  family  can  have  lit- 
tle effect  in  the  region  of  actual  achievement. 
A  civilization  is  measured  across  its  pinnacles, 
not  around  its  foundations. 

The  persistent  infertility  of  the  better  stocks 
aims  directly  at  the  height  of  these  pinnacles 
of  achievement.  Science,  literature,  the  cul- 
tural arts,  and  the  ethical  and  philosophic 
standards  which  are  the  essence  of  civiliza- 
tion, cannot  exist  in  wholesome,  vigorous 
quality  without  superior  human  values  in 
good  supply.     Failing  adequate  self-perpetu- 

71 


MANKIND 

ation,  a  civilization  must  rely  upon  the  emer- 
gence of  exceptional  men  from  its  reservoirs 
of  human  supply — sometimes  from  the  masses 
in  its  cities,  but  more  from  towns,  villages, 
country,  or  distant  lands — wherever  there  is 
unexploited  human  material  which  has  bred 
more  in  accordance  with  nature's  design  to 
conserve  effectives  and  discourage  ineffectives. 

The  value  of  this  supply  cannot  be  esti- 
mated by  its  numbers,  like  so  many  men  to 
be  lined  up  and  shot  at  or  fed  into  the  indus- 
tries. It  must  be  of  the  quality  of  men  and 
women  who  breed  a  fair  proportion  of  able 
men. 

Now,  each  migration  of  ability  from  a  group 
removes  from  it  one  source  of  genetic  value. 
The  group  tends  thereafter  to  breed  more 
nearly  true  to  its  average  quality,  and  to  pro- 
duce fewer  migrators.  Repeating  this  with- 
drawal of  the  better  stocks  a  sufficient  numbei" 
of  times,  the  group  may  still  continue  to  breed 
the  quality  of  men  to  be  lined  up  and  shot  at 
or  fed  into  the  indus«tries,  just  as  great  deca- 
dent peoples  on  the  Mediterranean  are  breed- 
ing to-day,  but  as  a  source  of  men  able  to  keep 
a  civilization  going  it  will  be  as  "played  out" 

72 


EFFECTS  OF  DISPROPORTIONATE  INCREASE 

as  a  mine  that  has  had  its  veins  of  ore  dug 
down  to  unresponsive  rock. 

The  impoverishing  of  a  civihzation's  racial 
values  may  be  spread  over  centuries,  while 
the  individual,  comprehending  little  more 
than  his  own  span  of  life,  fails  to  note  its  ap- 
proach. But  before  its  lessening  supply  of 
exceptional  ability  becomes  a  generally  recog- 
nized menace,  the  signs  are  unfailing  to  those 
who  will  look  for  them.  The  momentum  of 
the  industrial  machine  may  still  be  carrying 
forward  material  development,  while  at  the 
same  time  the  social  structure  is  being  under- 
mined. 

These  are  some  of  the  signs  by  which  we 
may  know  a  people  going  to  decay  through 
failure  of  their  sustaining  stocks:  Such  a 
people,  having  been  led  for  generations  to 
moral  and  cultural  heights  not  of  their  own 
creating,  are  left  to  face  a  dearth  of  true 
leadership  among  ideals  upon  which  they 
do  not  have  a  self-sustaining  grasp.  Then 
becomes  manifest  how  little  they  have  had 
to  do  with  the  building  of  those  ideals.  The 
great  middle-class  masses  suffer  compara- 
tively little  in  the  quality  of  their  mental 

73 


MANKIND 

inheritances  from  the  erratic  breeding  of  the 
extremes;  they  are  quite  as  ripe  at  one  time 
as  at  another  to  revert  to  their  more  natural 
inclinations  if  bereft  of  capable  leadership. 
Without  their  Moses,  the  people  in  any 
age  turn  as  easily  as  the  Israelites  to  run 
after  false  gods.  Pseudo-leadership,  display- 
ing a  thousand  forms  of  sensuous  attrac- 
tiveness, finds  in  them  a  ready  following. 
Literature  tries  out  every  avenue  of  sensa- 
tional appeal  with  no  more  than  a  reflection 
of  its  former  stable  worth.  Sexual  morbidity 
becomes  the  dominant  note  in  the  new  sym- 
phony of  living.  Art,  music,  philosophy, 
ethics,  even  religion,  unable  to  attain  to 
more  lofty  ideals,  frantically  pursue  neu- 
rotic vagaries  for  something  to  set  before  an 
unguided  popular  fancy.  Cohesion  and  unity 
of  thought  and  purpose — sure  evidences  of 
orderly  leadership — give  way  to  a  feverish, 
rampant  individualism  that  leads  in  all  direc- 
tions and  arrives  nowhere.  Little,  distorted 
souls  catch  the  public  eye,  and  conspicuous- 
ness  is  esteemed  as  greatness.  Desire  for 
luxury  and  self-gratification,  always  present 
in  the  unthinking,  await  only  the  disintegra- 
tion of  old  ideals  to  develop  into  excesses. 

74 


EFFECTS  OF  DISPROPORTIONATE  INCREASE 

The  people  turn  their  backs  upon  the  wisdom 
of  centuries,  and  strive  madly,  almost  pain- 
fully, for  sensuous  enjoyment. 

All  this  while  the  ineffectives  of  the  race 
have  been  steadily  multiplying  their  kind 
against  the  infertility  that  overtakes  the  rest 
of  mankind  in  the  ascending  scale  of  racial 
worth.  The  over-crowded  discontent  down 
underneath  finds  added  cause  in  the  riotous 
extravagance  of  those  above  for  shaking  the 
foundations  of  the  social  structure.  It  mat- 
ters little  which  of  the  two  most  threatens  its 
stability,  for,  like  a  wounded  bird,  a  decadent 
civilization  is  never  left  to  die  of  its  own  hurt; 
a  structure  so  rotten  becomes  a  standing  in- 
vitation to  less  emasculated  peoples  to  step 
up  and  topple  it  over.  It  is  said  that  every 
wounded  bird  has  an  enemy  at  hand  to  put  a 
merciful  end  to  its  sufferings.  History  shows 
that  every  civilization,  become  decrepit,  has 
been  spared  the  humiliation  of  falling  to 
pieces  of  its  own  weight  by  the  timely  appear- 
ance of  a  willing  foe. 

From  Babylonia  to  Mexico  are  the  remains 
of  civilizations  burned  out,  of  peoples  formerly 
great  whose  best  blood  has  been  so  long  and 
persistently  drained  away  from  them  that  to- 
rs 


MANKIND 

day  they  breed  as  true  to  a  low  mediocrity  as 
rabbits  breed  long  ears;  peoples  long  since 
turned  back  by  poverty  to  the  forms,  but  not 
to  the  substance,  of  thrift  and  virtue;  living 
among  imposing  structures  left  by  their  illus- 
trious predecessors,  with  no  conception  of  the 
greatness  of  either  because  the  rich  heritages 
which  made  their  greatness  possible  were  not 
passed  on  to  them. 

Of  course  the  fall  of  successive  civilizations 
cannot  be  viewed,  recorded,  and  disposed  of 
in  this  easy  manner.  The  event  for  each  was 
conditioned  on  a  thousand  influences  more  or 
less  peculiar  to  its  own  case.  But  the  self- 
destruction  of  its  best  blood  is  the  common 
factor  which  determines  for  every  civilization 
that  it  is  bound  to  die.  It  is  also  the  only 
factor  that  can  account  for  the  significant 
failure  of  every  fallen  civilization  to  come 
back  to  even  a  semblance  of  its  former  life. 
For  conquest  has  not  usually  obliterated  peo- 
ples; were  the  qualities  which  make  for  great- 
ness still  in  them,  their  fall  would  have  been 
a  catastrophe  to  be  repaired,  a  wrong  to  be 
avenged  with  the  strength  that  follows  a 
chastening  of  the  spirit,  and  great  civiliza- 

76 


EFFECTS  OF  DISPROPORTIONATE  INCREASE 

tions  would  have  risen  again  upon  the  ruins 
of  Babylon,  Egypt,  Greece,  and  Rome. 

Racial  decadence  must  precede  defeat  at 
arms  if  the  conquest  of  a  people  Is  to  be  made 
secure.  The  conquering  of  racial  strength  by 
military  strength,  however  profitable  at  the 
time,  makes  in  the  end  an  over-expensive 
enemy;  hence  the  utter  folly  of  most  wars 
between  civilized  nations.  Napoleon,  with 
all  his  genius  for  war,  had  to  learn  in  bitter- 
ness the  futility  of  conquering  racially  sound 
peoples.  Bismarck's  easy  ravishment  of 
France  stirred  a  volcano  that  may  yet  de- 
stroy his  Empire.  William  II,  viewing  con- 
quest with  mediaeval  eyes  in  this  enlightened 
age,  blundered  worst  of  all.  And  the  victors 
in  this  war  can  do  as  badly  if  they  fail  to 
shape  their  terms  of  peace  to  the  inexorable 
facts  of  racial  strength. 

It  is  not  in  the  line  of  this  study  to  apply 
to  history  the  principle  of  erratic  breeding. 
That  is  a  work  for  historians.  Some  day  the 
histories  of  dead  civilizations  will  be  re- 
written with  a  better  estimate  of  the  factor 
that  was  more  potent  than  the  sword  in  wip- 
ing them  so  completely  off  the  earth. 

77 


CHAPTER  VIII 
HUMAN  VALUES  IN  RESERVE 

SUCCESSIVE  BREEDING-GROUNDS — ^THE  MIGRATOR — SUR- 
VIVAL OF  THE  BEST — ISOLATION  A  FACTOR  IN  RACE 
BUILDING — IMPEDIMENTS  OF  LANGUAGE  AND  RACIAL 
DIFFERENCES 

THE  evident  dependence  of  a  civilization 
upon  importations  of  ability  from  un- 
developed stocks  leads  naturally  to  the  ques- 
tion, How  have  the  superior  inborn  qualities 
of  these  undeveloped  stocks  been  maintained 
for  thousands  of  years  against  the  drain  of 
each  succeeding  civilization  ? 

The  human  race  has  in  effect  maintained 
enormous  successive  breeding-grounds  apart 
from  its  centres  of  civilization,  in  which  selec- 
tive processes,  somewhat  imperfect,  to  be  sure, 
operated  to  perpetuate  vigor  and  ability, 
and  to  eliminate  weakness  and  incapacity. 
A  conspicuous  feature  in  the  history  of  the 
race  has  been  its  constant  migrations  into 
less  settled,  less  civilized  portions  of  the  earth, 

78 


HUMAN  VALUES   IN  RESERVE 

and  generally  westward.  These  migrations 
have  been  of  every  variety,  but  usually  of  a 
selective  nature  in  that  a  large  proportion  of 
the  migrators  were  the  more  hardy,  resource- 
ful, and  ambitious  of  the  peoples  from  which 
they  came.  These  stocks  settled  in  new 
country  and  lived  under  conditions  which 
approached  closely  the  terms  for  the  survival 
of  the  more  fit. 

Whether  they  were  the  earliest  migrators 
from  the  still  undiscovered  cradle  of  civiliza- 
tion in  Asia  who  made  the  Babylonian  and 
Egyptian  civilizations,  or  the  vigorous  hordes 
of  northern  Europe  out  of  whom  has  come 
much  of  present-day  European  culture,  or  our 
own  hardy  pioneers  from  the  East  to  the  West 
of  only  one  hundred  years  ago,  there  was  al- 
ways a  similarity  in  the  fundamental  condi- 
tion that  strength,  vigor,  and  resourcefulness 
were  the  guarantees  of  survival.  The  sturdy 
routine  of  every  community  life  away  from 
contact  with  civilization  centres  about  the 
home  and  children.  They  become  naturally 
the  main  interest  of  an  existence  rather  bare 
of  objectives.  They  were  the  strength  of  the 
patriarchal  or  tribal  groups  among  the  less 

79 


MANKIND 

developed  peoples,  and  the  chief  material  ad- 
vantage and  social  asset  of  strong  men  and 
women  who  had  left  behind  them  the  dis- 
tractions of  more  highly  organized  society. 
Naturally,  the  vigorous  and  resourceful  se- 
cured these  benefits  of  home  and  children  in 
greater  degree.  They  were  the  more  prolific, 
as  nature  intends  her  strong  shall  always 
be.  The  weak  and  ineffective  were  less  able 
to  gain  even  the  simple  protection  and  neces- 
saries which  made  possible  their  own  sur- 
vival. In  the  face  of  adverse  conditions  some 
weaklings  died,  others  gave  up  the  contest 
and  returned  to  mingle  their  feebler  heredity 
with  the  stay-at-homes.  Thus  the  selective 
process,  begun  with  the  choosing  of  vigorous 
stocks  for  migration,  was  in  the  usual  case 
continued  as  long  as  primitive  conditions 
lasted;  constantly  improving  a  human  stock 
rich  in  the  physical  and  mental  qualities 
which  go  to  the  successful  building  of  a 
civilization.  And  the  significant  thing  about 
this  process  is  that  it  created  no  new  qualities; 
it  multiplied  the  good  and  decimated  the  bad 
in  the  human  material  with  which  it  had  to 
do.    The  essence  of  this  breeding  system,  as 

80 


HUMAN  VALUES  IN  RESERVE 

of  any  other,  is  in  the  high  quahty  of  the 
first  selection  of  the  stocks  to  be  bred,  and 
in  continuing  the  selection  of  the  best  over 
a  considerable  period.  However  we  may 
now  revolt  at  the  thought  of  breeding  hu- 
man beings,  we  have  the  good  racial  values 
of  to-day,  and  our  civilization,  only  because 
living  conditions  until  comparatively  recent 
times  held  the  bulk  of  the  race  to  the  busi- 
ness of  breeding  effective  human  stock.  Our 
human  fuel,  like  the  coal  we  burn,  is  a  gift 
from  another  age. 

If  we  remember  that  until  scarcely  more 
than  a  thousand  years  ago  dominant,  consum- 
ing civilizations  were  few  and  localized,  while 
vast  portions  of  the  temperate  zone  offered 
favorable  conditions  for  natural  selective 
breeding,  we  may  readily  understand  why  the 
sturdy  qualities  of  the  race  have  outlived  the 
successive  local  dissolutions.  The  steady  in- 
crease since  early  history  in  the  number  of 
contemporaneous  civilizations  indicates  that 
racial  upbuilding  in  the  human  preserves  was 
more  than  keeping  pace  with  racial  destruc- 
tion at  the  centres.  It  is  apparent  that,  until 
at  least  within  the  last  few  hundred  years, 

8i 


MANKIND 

dearth  of  selectively  bred  human  material 
was  never  more  than  a  local  phenomenon. 

In  a  description  so  brief  it  is  impossible 
to  Indicate  more  than  a  general  trend  in  hu- 
man breeding  under  natural  conditions.  Its 
ways  were  not  so  simple  nor  its  selections 
always  the  best  for  the  ultimate  good  of  the 
race,  as  one  might  hastily  conclude.  There  is 
a  wide  distinction  between  *' fittest"  as  ap- 
plied to  natural  selection,  and  "best"  as  used 
to  designate  an  ideal.  In  natural  breeding  of 
animal  and  plant  life  the  "fittest"  survive, 
not  because  they  are  the  "best"  according  to 
some  external  standard  of  desirability,  but 
because  they  are  best  adapted,  fitted,  to  meet 
the  stern  conditions  of  their  environment.  It 
is  only  in  our  breeding-stables  and  the  like, 
where  we  select  for  desirable  points,  that  none 
but  the  "best"  survive. 

Fortunately  for  the  race,  it  may  be  said  of 
human  breeding  under  natural  conditions  that 
most  of  the  qualities  which  survive  as  the 
"fittest"  for  the  vigorous  life  are  also  the 
"best"  for  the  purposes  of  civilization. 

In  a  system  of  selective  breeding  so  imper- 
fect  as  that  of  man   even  under  the  most 

82 


HUMAN  VALUES   IN  RESERVE 

natural  conditions,  it  is  essential  that  the 
best  genetic  values  be  turned  back  into  the 
racial  blood  for  many  generations,  even  many- 
centuries,  before  the  proportion  of  exception- 
ally good  material  becomes  sufficiently  great 
to  withstand  for  any  considerable  time  the 
drain  of  a  civilization.  Isolation  is  the  most 
effective  means  for  preventing  the  escape 
of  the  ambitious  and  resourceful  from  the 
monotony  of  racial  development  to  the  ex- 
citements of  individual  development.  There 
is  the  isolation  of  distance  and  of  inacces- 
sibility by  reason  of  oceans  and  great  moun- 
tain ranges.  These  have  now  been  pretty 
much  overcome  with  respect  to  every  portion 
of  the  earth.  Previously  in  this  book  the 
remarkable  dead-level  of  means  for  travel 
and  communication  down  to  one  hundred 
years  ago  was  commented  upon;  we  now 
see  that  this  inability  of  peoples  to  get  to- 
gether was  one  effective  means  for  preserving 
great  areas  of  the  human  family  for  future 
exploitation.  Greece  and  Rome  exhausted 
the  resources  of  their  own  peoples  and  de- 
pendencies without  getting  access  in  any 
general  way  to  the  values  in  the  undeveloped 

83 


MANKIND 

hordes  to  the  north  of  them.  Consequently 
these  hordes  succeeded  Greece  and  Rome 
in  estabUshing  the  civIHzations  of  another 
age.  If  at  any  stage  of  the  world's  history  a 
powerful  civilization  had  had  free  draft  upon 
all  the  undeveloped  human  stocks  of  the 
earth,  that  civilization  might  have  lasted 
long  and  blazed  with  exceeding  glory,  but 
with  its  final  burning  out  all  prospect  of  fu- 
ture civilizations  for  this  earth  would  have 
been  as  dead  as  Babylon. 

But  physical  isolation  alone  did  not  pre- 
vent the  putting  of  the  whole  world's  racial 
powder  into  one  rocket.  The  impediments  of 
language,  customs,  inborn  racial  antagonisms, 
fundamental  differences  in  mental  constitu- 
tion and,  therefore,  in  responses  to  similar 
impressions — these  assisted  geographic  im- 
pediments in  preventing  excessive  drafts  upon 
the  world's  human  values  in  reserve,  and  both 
together  determined  the  slow  succession  of 
essentially  unlike  civilizations. 

Thus  the  inaccessibility  of  the  world's  com- 
plete store  of  human  values  to  the  prodigal 
demands  of  any  one  civilization  was  the  guar- 
antee that  another  should  always  rise  to  take 

84 


HUMAN  VALUES   IN  RESERVE 

its  place.  And  this  raises  the  pertinent  ques- 
tion, How  would  a  universal  civilization  man- 
age to  replenish  its  extravagant  waste  of  effec- 
tive human  material  ? 


85 


CHAPTER  IX 
EXHAUSTION  OF  RESERVES 

RACE  CONSERVATION  ON  NEW  BASIS — QUICK  COMMUNI- 
CATION HASTENS  EXHAUSTION  OF  RESERVES — NEW 
ENGLAND — OVERESTIMATE  OF  INDIVIDUAL — CIVILI- 
ZATION MUST  BREED  ITS  OWN  RACE  VALUES — A 
GLIMPSE    AHEAD 

WITH  the  brief  generalizations  in  the 
preceding  chapter  we  may  take  this 
racial  Inquiry  from  the  somewhat  even  course 
of  past  history  to  the  more  interesting  racial 
chaos  of  the  present  day.  Will  the  reserves 
of  undeveloped  ability  hold  out  under  twen- 
tieth-century conditions  ? 

We  scarcely  appreciate  that  the  revolution- 
ary developments  of  a  hundred  years  have 
wholly  reset  the  course  of  human  affairs  and 
made  forecasts  of  the  future  based  upon  the 
past  like  as  many  dreams;  we  realize  still  less 
that  this  revolution  has  affected  the  very 
foundations  of  race  existence.  The  world 
now  faces  an  utterly  new  prospect  for  the 
perpetuation  of  its  racial  values. 

Distance  and  physical  barriers  have  yielded 
86 


EXHAUSTION  OF  RESERVES 

to  modern  invention.  Man  now  flashes  his 
words  across  the  earth  by  no  less  than  four 
effective  devices;  his  several  methods  of  trans- 
port make  light  of  seas  and  continents.  So 
with  the  spread  of  life's  complexities  to  the 
remotest  corners  has  come  a  levelling  of  con- 
ditions, and  opportunity  waits  everywhere 
upon  those  of  exceptional  capacity. 

Thus  we  have  come  almost  unawares  upon 
this  critical  situation:  the  system  of  breeding 
selectively  in  isolation,  either  in  lands  distant 
or  in  rural  communities  close  at  hand,  is  made 
impossible;  the  only  guarantee  that  the  world 
has  had  of  human  values  in  reserve  for  its 
constant  rebuilding  has  gone  by  the  board; 
and  now  mankind  must  find  a  way  to  con- 
serve its  effective  inheritances  in  the  midst  of 
all-pervading  influences  which  directly  oppose 
their  conservation. 

This  is  something  that  has  not  been  done 
since  the  beginning.  The  ancient  Greeks 
attempted  the  breeding  of  ability  as  they  saw 
racial  impoverishment  coming  upon  them,  but 
failed.  Perhaps  other  civilizations  tried  to 
replace  from  within  the  vigor  that  had  ceased 
to  come  from  without.     We  do  not  know. 

87 


MANKIND 

But  we  do  know  that  if  they  had  succeeded 
they  would  have  Uved. 

Yet  so  long  as  there  were  great  stores  of 
potential  ability  inaccessible  to  these  civiliza- 
tions, it  did  not  matter  so  much  that  they 
burned  themselves  out.  Others  stood  ready 
to  kindle  the  torch  of  a  new  civilization  at  the 
dying  embers  of  the  old,  and  to  carry  it  for- 
ward until  they,  too,  should  sink  exhausted 
before  those  who  were  to  succeed  them.  But 
now  that  all  effective  human  material  is  being 
drafted  at  once  into  the  service  of  a  world- 
wide civilization,  it  does  matter  greatly  that 
we  are  consuming  it  in  the  same  lavish  way 
without  a  thought  of  future  replenishment. 

Quick  communication  has  done  more  than 
open  up  every  human  preserve  to  exploita- 
tion; It  has  facilitated  the  rapid  peopling  of 
the  last  of  the  world's  vacant  spaces.  But 
vacant  spaces  could  never  again  have  served 
the  race  as  in  all  the  ages  past.  A  vacant 
America  to-day  could  not  escape  the  railroad, 
steamship,  telegraph,  telephone,  and  become 
In  the  old  sense  a  land  held  to  the  develop- 
ment of  racial  values.  This  is  equally  true  of 
any  section  of  the  earth  still  open  and  favor- 


EXHAUSTION  OF  RESERVES 

able  for  settlement.  Opportunity,  not  physi- 
cal barrier,  now  holds  strong  men  to  the  wilds 
— and  the  pursuit  of  opportunity  leads  di- 
rectly away  from  race  development. 

In  a  word,  there  are  to-day  no  areas  of 
selective  breeding.  The  easy  access  of  arti- 
ficial conditions  to  every  habitable  spot  on 
earth  has  made  race  development  in  the  old, 
natural  way  an  impossibility.  We  may  as 
well  dismiss  the  prospect  of  future  selective 
migrations,  of  peoples  held  for  centuries  to 
the  upbuilding  of  hereditary  values. 

A  specific  example  may  convey  a  clearer 
idea  of  these  racial  happenings.  The  immi- 
gration of  the  Puritans  and  Pilgrims  equipped 
this  new  country  with  a  quality  of  stock 
which  for  many  generations  was  most  In  evi- 
dence as  the  great,  sustaining  stock  of  the 
land.  They  were,  to  begin  with,  selected 
stocks,  with  an  exceptionally  large  proportion 
of  strong  personal  characteristics.  It  was  this 
same  stock,  somewhat  mixed  with  other 
stocks  more  or  less  worthy,  that  from  time 
to  time  pushed  westward  and  again  west- 
ward, until  it  reached  the  Pacific  coast,  and 
each  time   It  was  the  more   ambitious,   the 

89 


MANKIND 

more  vigorous  of  the  communities  who  mi- 
grated. 

For  more  than  one  hundred  years  the 
flower  of  this  nation's  abihty  came  from  the 
rugged  country  districts  of  New  England; 
but  even  the  wonderful  qualities  which  were 
in  the  rich  heritage  of  New  England  could 
not  withstand  the  double  drain  of  the  flight 
to  the  cities  and  the  successive  migrations  to 
the  West.  New  England's  position  as  the 
main  source  of  exceptional  men  is  gone.  It 
is  to  the  great  West,  to  which  has  gone  much 
of  the  best  of  New  England's  stock,  that  we 
now  look  and  will  increasingly  look  for  the 
main  strength  of  the  nation.  It  would  seem 
as  if  our  supply  were  almost  infinite — as  if 
so  great  a  volume  of  unexploited  material  of 
strong  ancestry  could  never  be  exhausted. 

But  these  selective  migrations  can  no  more 
take  place.  Every  portion  of  this  country  is 
now  in  the  condition  of  a  settled  community, 
just  as  New  England  was  in  the  position  of  a 
settled  community  one  hundred  years  ago. 
And  as  the  eastern  centres  of  population 
were  at  that  time  beginning  their  drain  on 
the  New  England  districts,  centres  of  popu- 

90 


EXHAUSTION  OF  RESERVES 

lation  now  dotted  all  over  our  land  are  in  a 
similar  way  draining  the  entire  country  at 
once  of  its  best  stocks. 

This  wholesale  drain  upon  unexploited  re- 
serves is  now  an  almost  universal  phenome- 
non. The  lure  of  the  new-fangled  civilization 
reaches  every  spot  on  earth.  City,  college, 
factory,  business,  are  within  a  day's  journey 
of  all  but  a  few.  No  superior  man,  restless 
in  his  too  meagre  surroundings,  is  beyond 
hearing  of  the  call  to  self-development;  then 
why  stick  to  the  slow  business  of  race  devel- 
opment ?  The  weak  brother  remains  behind 
to  multiply,  while  the  strong  rises  to  a  posi- 
tion of  greater  usefulness  and  comparative 
infertility.  No  sooner  does  inborn  capacity 
show  itself  in  the  remotest  corner  than  it  is 
whisked  away  to  "make  good." 

The  tapping  of  the  whole  world's  human 
resources  is  quite  as  if  several  reservoirs  of 
water,  in  usual  times  drawn  upon  succes- 
sively, were  at  once  piped  for  rapid  delivery 
to  a  great,  final  aquatic  display.  This  sort  of 
display  we  are  now  witnessing.  The  easy  flow 
of  talent  to  its  opportunity,  the  unprecedented 
gathering  of  the  world's  ability  at  its  effective 

91 


MANKIND 

centres,  leads  naturally  to  a  burst  of  material 
achievement  the  like  of  which  was  never  be- 
fore seen.  And  never  did  ability  work  to  so 
good  advantage.  Each  new  discovery  adds 
to  knowledge,  and  the  new  knowledge  leads 
to  further  discovery.  The  cumulative  reac- 
tions of  one  upon  the  other  give  an  almost 
uncanny  potency  to  human  endeavor. 

Small  wonder  that  common  sense  is  re- 
peatedly assailed  by  insistence  that  man  must 
suddenly  have  become  a  very  superior  being. 
It  is  little  understood  that  the  great  achieve- 
ments of  to-day  are  due  to  the  unfolding  of 
one  discovery  after  another  in  natural  se- 
quence, by  many  experimenters  and  in  vari- 
ous departments  of  science.  We  should  not 
mistake  cumulative  effects  for  individual  ef- 
fects, nor  assume  a  rise  in  individual  capacity 
because  of  results  from  intense  co-ordination 
of  the  world's  talent. 

The  eye  fixes  upon  the  capstone  of  a  pyra- 
mid, not  because  it  is  an  uncommon  stone, 
but  because  it  is  at  the  top  of  so  many  other 
stones.  Nowadays  we  are  in  the  spectacular 
business  of  putting  capstones  to  many  pyra- 
mids of  achievement  whose  lower  tiers  were 

92 


EXHAUSTION  OF  RESERVES 

laid  by  predecessors  of  equal  ability,  equal 
resourcefulness — laid,  perhaps,  with  greater 
ingenuity  in  the  lack  of  our  own  scientific 
knowledge.  A  broader  appreciation  of  the 
patient  labor  of  the  ages,  which  we  are  now 
turning  to  quick  account,  might  assist  our 
modesty  and  awaken  us  to  the  extravagant 
use  we  are  making  of  the  world's  store  of 
hereditary  values. 

To  be  sure,  this  exceptional  stock  is  not  led 
at  once  to  destruction,  but  it  is  led  to  a  com- 
parative infertility  that  makes  further  drafts 
upon  reserves  inevitable.  We  see  with  our 
own  eyes  the  effects  of  this  drain  in  country- 
sides, villages,  small  towns,  at  this  moment 
in  process  of  succumbing,  not  to  any  lack  of 
numbers,  nor  to  decrease  in  natural  oppor- 
tunity, but  to  the  dead  weight  of  their  own 
depreciated  human  material.  These  breed- 
ing-places which  have  emptied  the  last  of 
their  superior  values  into  the  insatiable  maw 
of  civilization  fail  to  teach  us  a  lesson  because 
until  now  there  have  always  come  forward 
other  communities,  other  reservoirs  from 
which  the  needed  supply  could  be  drawn. 
For  that  reason  as  much  as  any  other,  we  do 

93 


MANKIND 

not  see  in  a  racially  impoverished  country- 
side the  beginnings  of  a  racially  impoverished 
civilization. 

Since  there  are  to  be  no  more  reservoirs  of 
unexploited  values  to  succeed  those  now 
being  depleted,  it  follows  naturally  that  the 
racial  values  of  the  future  will  he  just  such  as 
society  decides  to  breed  within  its  own  environ- 
ment. If  it  chooses  to  ignore  the  situation 
and  continues  to  breed  away  from  the  best 
as  it  has  always  done,  this  million-year-old 
human  race  is  comparatively  near  the  end  of 
its  effective  life.  To  survive,  civilization 
must  somehow  get  its  race  values  into  a 
stable  condition  of  supply  and  demand  within 
itself.     These  are  the  alternatives. 

It  is  unthinkable  that  this  world-wide 
civilization — unified  with  respect  to  scientific 
achievement,  however  disrupted  politically — 
will  not  at  least  attempt  to  meet  these  ex- 
traordinary racial  conditions.  Our  command 
of  knowledge  and  of  ways  and  means  should 
lead  us  to  a  greater  success  than  the  Greeks 
attained.  A  consciousness  of  race  in  its 
larger  sense  is  rapidly  developing  among  the 
thoughtful  of  all  countries.     The  near  future 

94 


EXHAUSTION  OF  RESERVES 

seems  likely  to  be  quite  occupied  with  schemes 
for  reversing  the  present  destructive  order  of 
human  propagation.  What  sort  of  workable 
plan  will  finally  be  evolved  is  a  matter  of  con- 
jecture, but  whatever  it  is,  it  will  undoubtedly 
involve  in  some  degree  the  yielding  of  the 
individual  to  the  good  of  the  race.  If  this  is 
to  continue  as  an  orderly  world,  the  time  is 
coming — why  speculate  as  to  the  century, 
since  man's  existence  is  reckoned  in  ages — 
when  the  business  of  race  conservation  will 
be  taken  over  by  society  and  given  a  place 
among  other  activities  commensurate  with 
its  importance.  The  people  of  that  day  will 
look  back  with  incredulous  wonder  upon  the 
time  when  any  two  people  not  in  jail  or  the 
lunatic  asylum  could  procreate  at  will;  and 
with  equal  wonder  that  exceptional  ability 
should  have  been  permitted  to  carry  with  it 
to  the  grave  its  irreplaceable  inheritances — • 
rich  with  the  selective  breeding  of  centuries, 
only  to  be  destroyed  at  the  beginning  of  use- 
fulness. 

Possibly  these  people  will  also  be  looking 
at  gasolene  in  a  phial  and  at  coal  in  a  museum; 
but  for  these  their  ingenuity  will  have  devised 

95 


MANKIND 

substitutes.  There  is  no  substitute  for  brains. 
The  only  way  to  multiply  rich  inheritances  is 
to  breed  them,  and  the  only  way  to  eliminate 
undesirable  inheritances  is  to  stop  breeding 
them. 

How  infinitely  beyond  conception  must  all 
this  be  in  a  social  state  that  restrains  scarcely 
one-fourth  of  its  outright  defectives  from  re- 
producing their  kind,  and  merely  hints  at 
the  wastage  of  its  superior  hereditary  values ! 
Yet  to  assert  that  the  community  will  never 
guide  the  reproductive  function  of  any  except 
its  defectives  is  to  confess  the  ultimate  failure 
of  all  civilization. 


96 


CHAPTER  X 
RISE  OF  THE  ARYAN 

man's    time    compared    to    all    time — PHYSICAL    AND 

MENTAL  UNLIKENESSES ORIGIN  OF  THE  ARYAN — HIS 

CHARACTERISTICS — HIS  MIGRATIONS — RACIALLY  DE- 
STRUCTIVE INFLUENCES — DEPRECIATED  RACE  MIX- 
TURES 

WITH  the  thought  that  the  world's  sup- 
ply of  ability  is  now  running  to  ex- 
haustion in  a  manner  without  parallel  in  any 
previous  racial  failure,  it  becomes  a  matter 
of  fascinating  importance  to  inquire  into  the 
present  resources  of  the  human  race  in  this 
respect.  What  are  the  prospects  of  the  vari- 
ous civilized  peoples  for  a  continuance  of 
racial  effectiveness  ?  And  are  there  dormant 
peoples  now  on  earth  who  may  be  carrying 
undeveloped  the  divine  fire,  as  dormant  peo- 
ples since  the  beginning  have  carried  it  until 
opportunity  came  ? 

A  book  that  holds  to  a  non-technical  pres- 
entation of  an  essentially  technical  subject 
should  not  lead  its  readers  into  the  mazes  of 

97 


MANKIND 

race  history.  That  Hterature  is  voluminous, 
with  scarcely  two  writers  of  the  same  opinion, 
mainly  because  too  many  of  them  are  bent  on 
persuading  their  readers  to  some  pet  idea. 
Yet  among  the  best  of  them  there  is  sufficient 
accord  with  respect  to  fundamentals  to  estab- 
lish the  subject  upon  a  foundation  of  reason- 
ably certain  facts,  and  to  commend  it  as  a 
most  fruitful  study. 

The  earliest  fragments  of  race  history  take 
us  back  only  a  step  into  the  long  stretch  of 
man's  life  as  a  developed  human;  and  if  we 
conceive  that  the  untold  ages  of  his  evolution 
from  his  ape-like  ancestors  lie  still  further 
back  in  that  impenetrable  darkness  of  time, 
we  may  be  able  to  comprehend  how  infinitesi- 
mally  little  man  has  been  affected  by  evolu- 
tionary processes  since  our  acquaintance  with 
him.  Those  processes  undoubtedly  are  as 
active  to-day  as  in  any  day  of  the  world's  life, 
but  time  is  the  essential  factor  with  them, 
and  man's  time,  compared  to  All  Time,  is  like 
a  minute  in  a  thousand  years. 

Opinion  is  divided  on  the  question  whether 
all  mankind  is  descended  from  a  single  wide 
variation  among  his  unhuman  predecessors, 

98 


RISE  OF  THE  ARYAN 

or  from  several  different  variations,  in  several 
localities  and  probably  in  different  though  not 
widely  separated  periods.  Significant  differ- 
ences in  bone  structure  between  races  now 
living  incline  many  to  the  latter  view,  but 
the  question  does  not  in  the  least  concern  us. 
Marked  unlikenesses  and  inequalities,  espe- 
cially of  mental  attributes,  are  the  facts  of 
to-day,  however  they  arrived. 

Mankind  is  divided  into  races  primarily  ac- 
cording to  physical  unlikeness;  but  dissimilari- 
ties of  mental  attributes  and  capacities  are  so 
closely  associated  with  outward  physical  dif- 
ferences that  they  enter  as  important  factors 
in  distinguishing  races  one  from  another. 
Whether  or  not  the  mental  attributes  which 
have  set  up  the  White  as  the  dominant  race 
of  the  world  were  also  once  lodged  with  the 
Yellow,  the  Black,  and  other  inferior  races, 
and  gradually  became  lost  through  out- 
breeding during  their  millenniums  of  separa- 
tion from  the  parent  stock,  is  a  question  as 
unanswerable  as  it  is  unimportant.  The  out- 
standing fact  is  that  they  are  not  possessed  of 
these  attributes  to-day.  This  search  for  ra- 
cial ability  to  maintain  the  world's  civiliza- 

99 


MANKIND 

tions  need  not  go  a  step  beyond  the  unmixed 
White. 

The  origin  of  the  White  race — or  the  Aryan, 
which  is  so  nearly  coincident  with  the  White 
that  the  names  for  our  purpose  may  be  used 
interchangeably — is  quite  generally  held  to 
have  been  somewhere  in  the  plains  of  Central 
Asia,  at  a  time  when  that  vast  region  was 
better  wooded,  more  fertile,  and  blessed  with 
a  greater  rainfall  than  it  is  now.  To  this 
great  Aryan  race  are  attributed  the  qualities 
which  have  made  the  white  man  pre-eminent 
for  his  capacity  to  dominate  environment,  to 
migrate,  to  colonize,  to  subdue  both  nature 
and  other  men,  to  turn  both  to  his  advantage, 
to  develop  a  high  state  of  social  organization, 
and,  in  a  widely  comprehensive  sense,  to 
bring  things  to  pass.  Indeed,  many  go  to  the 
length  of  ascribing  appearances  in  any  race 
of  these  dominating  qualities  to  some  more  or 
less  remote  infusion  of  Aryan  blood. 

Many  thousand  years  ago  the  Aryan  began 
the  migrations  of  his  restless,  dominating 
breed — migrations  that  have  never  ceased  to 
this  day — venturing  into  the  lands  of  other 
peoples,  to  conquer,  to  establish  civilization, 

100 


RISE  OF  THE  ARYAN 

and  then  to  fail,  as  dominant  peoples  have 
always  failed,  mainly  through  the  dissipation 
of  their  racial  values. 

One  of  the  earliest,  if  not  the  first,  of  the 
Aryan  migrations  was  to  the  South,  down 
into  the  hot  plains  of  India,  into  a  climate 
poorly  adapted  to  the  survival  of  a  people 
bred  under  totally  different  conditions.  Sur- 
vival of  migrants  is  largely  dependent  on  their 
reasonable  adherence  to  isothermal  lines.  No 
pure  Aryan  stocks  have  lived  and  multiplied 
in  the  tropics;  a  people  so  far  outside  its  cli- 
matic element  must  seek  the  questionable 
protection  of  mixing  its  blood  with  that  of 
native  peoples.  So  in  India  the  Negroid- 
Aryan  increasingly  survived;  and  as  the 
chances  of  survival  naturally  increase  in  such 
cases  with  the  proportion  of  native  blood,  the 
Aryan  infusion  in  the  Negroid  of  India  finally 
became  diluted  to  a  degree  which  enabled  it 
to  persist  in  the  hybrid  race.  This  attenuated 
Aryan  stock  is  in  unmistakable  evidence 
among  certain  high-caste  East  Indians  of  the 
present  time. 

To  later  Aryan  migrations  are  ascribed  the 
Babylonian  and  Egyptian  civilizations.     Like 

lOI 


^ 


MANKIND 

those  of  India,  these  incursions  of  the  Aryans 
seem  to  have  taken  on  early  the  character  of 
infusions  of  Aryan  blood,  which  in  time  were 
even  more  completely  absorbed  into  that  of 
the  native  peoples — of  whose  origin,  by  the 
way,  we  know  next  to  nothing.  These,  and 
other  faintly  traceable  developments  at  the 
eastern  end  of  the  Mediterranean,  were  essen- 
tially the  work  of  mixed  Aryan-native  stocks, 
hampered  from  the  first  by  the  mixture  with 
inferior  blood,  and  finally  swamped  by  the 
excess  of  the  native  infusion.  Not  until  the 
days  of  Greece  and  Rome  does  the  Aryan 
appear  to  have  been  successful  in  maintaining 
his  racial  integrity  through  very  considerable 
periods  of  time — and  with  that  success  came 
the  acme  of  his  cultural  development. 

Other  great  Aryan  migrations  over-ran  all 
of  central  and  western  Europe,  giving  rise  to 
Celt,  Engle,  Frank,  Norse,  Teuton — names 
familiar  as  among  the  parent  stocks  of  the 
actively  dominant  peoples  of  our  time — all 
Aryans,  differentiated  into  unlike  peoples  by 
unlike  inheritances  from  the  original  Aryan 
stocks,  by  the  differing  effects  of  environ- 
ment   and    acquired    habits    upon    survival 

I02 


RISE  OF  THE  ARYAN 

values,  and,  most  of  them,  by  mixture  with 
native  stocks. 

Thus  we  view  briefly  the  advance  of  the 
great  Aryan  peoples.  For  the  record  of  their 
surgings  back  and  forth  in  endless,  conflict, 
their  overflowings  and  readjustments  and 
failures  and  successes,  their  slow  and  painful 
attaining  to  the  heights  which  distinguish 
them  above  all  other  peoples,  we  should  have 
to  read  most  of  the  volumes  of  the  world's 
history. 

The  disappearance  of  strong  Aryan  charac- 
teristics from  the  scenes  of  the  earlier  Aryan 
developments  about  the  Mediterranean  can- 
not be  so  fully  charged  to  unfavorable  climate 
as  in  the  case  of  the  Indian  migration.  It  is 
reasonable  to  suppose  that,  with  the  greater 
complexity  of  each  succeeding  Aryan  civiliza- 
tion, the  conditions  of  living  increasingly  ar- 
rayed themselves,  as  we  know  they  are 
arrayed  to-day,  against  the  adequate  survival 
of  the  better  stocks.  A  dominant  race  in 
contact  with  inferior  native  peoples  turns 
away  from  breeding  much  as  the  dominant 
individual  among  the  passive  of  his  own  kind. 
Both  are  preoccupied  builders  of  civilization; 

103 


MANKIND 

diverted  constantly  from  the  main  scheme  of 
nature  by  a  thousand  schemes  of  their  own; 
the  first  to  gain  the  trappings  of  luxury,  the 
first  to  feel  the  effects  of  indulgence,  the  first 
to  neglect  their  racial  duty  among  hordes 
that  do  no  other  duty  as  well.  As  to  these 
earlier  peoples  we  can  only  surmise,  but  in 
the  civilizations  of  Greece  and  Rome  we 
know,  that  social  conditions  favored  racial 
destruction  essentially  as  they  favor  it  in  our 
own  civilization.  We  must  never  forget  that 
since  history  began  there  has  been  no  appre- 
ciable change  in  inheritable  character  traits — 
only  in  the  infinite  variety  of  their  combina- 
tions. Human  nature  has  had  in  every  age 
the  tragedy  of  its  weaknesses  as  well  as  the 
glory  of  its  strength.  So,  beginning  with  the 
very  earliest  civilizations,  these  age-old  weak- 
nesses have  played  an  increasing  part  with 
that  other  racially  destructive  habit  of  the 
Aryan — mixing  with  inferior  stocks — at  tum- 
bling race.  State,  and  civilization  into  a  dusty 
heap  with  periodic  certainty. 

It  must  be  obvious  that  no  source  of  domi- 
nant blood  is  to  be  found  in  these  leavings  of 
dead  civilizations.     There  is  no  such  thing  as 

104 


RISE  OF  THE  ARYAN 

resurrection  for  characteristics  which  have 
been  ehminated  from  the  heritage  of  a  people. 
Thus  our  search  narrows.  With  these  de- 
cayed branches  of  the  Aryan  race  ehminated 
along  with  Yellow  and  Black  and  all  mixtures 
of  races,  one  must  be  impressed  by  the  vast- 
ness  of  the  multitudes  of  the  earth's  inhabi- 
tants who  are  forever  without  prospect  of 
developing  characteristics  at  all  comparable 
with  those  of  the  present  actively  dominant 
Aryan  peoples.  It  is  a  common  mistake  to 
regard  non-Aryans  as  races  in  their  infancy, 
delayed  in  maturing,  and  destined  for  later 
emergence.  There  is  no  basis  for  the  belief 
that  these  races  are  following,  ages  behind,  in 
the  footsteps  of  the  Aryan.  They  may  safely 
be  regarded  as  contemporary  races,  following 
different  courses  because  of  different  origins, 
or  because  of  ages  of  divergence  in  the  devel- 
opment of  widely  different  inheritances.  The 
world  has  been  theirs  as  well  as  ours,  and 
probably  for  as  long.  Climatic  condition  is 
not  a  determining  factor  in  racial  develop- 
ment. A  race  with  inborn  qualities  for  prog- 
ress chooses  its  climate  just  as  it  chooses  its 
fields  and  woods  and  harbors.     The  dominant 


MANKIND 

race  determines  its  environment;  environment 
does  not  determine  which  shall  be  the  domi- 
nant race.  The  best  natural  conditions  on 
earth  failed  to  make  anything  of  the  Ameri- 
can Indian,  and  the  scenes  which  favored  the 
Mediterranean  civilizations  were  passive  wit- 
nesses of  their  downfall. 

Our  estimate  of  race  values  must  not  be 
misled  by  what  these  inferior  peoples  can  be 
taught  to  do;  their  measure  is  in  what  they 
can  do  of  themselves.  It  is  of  no  consequence 
that  an  Abyssinian  can  handle  a  gun  with 
the  dexterity  of  a  white  man,  or  that  Congo 
natives  take  quickly  to  the  telephone;  they 
are  a  million  years  away  from  creating  either. 

The  peoples  of  four-fifths  of  the  globe  yield 
a  desultory  acceptance  to  the  achievements 
which  issue  from  the  dominant  Aryan.  The 
best  of  them  are  eager  copyists  who  may 
adapt,  but  rarely  add  to  the  original.  Other 
peoples,  particularly  the  Chinese,  Japanese, 
and  East  Indians,  created  early  civilizations 
of  their  own — the  two  latter  quite  certainly, 
and  the  Chinese  probably,  because  of  early 
infusion  of  Aryan  blood.  But  their  own  esti- 
mate of  these  creations  of  depreciated  Aryan 

1 06 


RISE  OF  THE  ARYAN 

is  shown  in  their  desire  for  the  essentials  of 
pure  Aryan  civiUzation. 

Then  it  is  to  the  Aryan  peoples  now  leading 
in  the  world's  affairs  that  we  must  look  for 
the  perpetuation  of  those  qualities  which  build 
and  sustain  civilizations.  This  part  of  our 
study  can  be  no  more  than  a  speculative  esti- 
mate of  racial  possibilities  and  prospects 
based  upon  premises  already  set  down.  If 
we  have  come  to  a  truer  understanding  of 
what  constitutes  racial  values,  this  estimate 
should  be  in  the  nature  of  a  revaluation  of 
the  hereditary  elements  in  mankind  upon 
which  the  whole  future  life  of  the  race  de- 
pends. A  matter  so  vast  is  sure  to  come 
very  imperfectly  from  only  one  man's  opinion. 
It  is  hoped  that  this  attempt  to  show  the 
urgency  of  the  situation  may  turn  others, 
eager  for  vital  problems,  to  the  study  of  the 
human  breed.  A  world  facing  a  racial  crisis 
more  profound  than  any  in  its  history  needs 
the  counsels  of  its  ablest  men. 


107 


CHAPTER  XI 
ARYAN  RACIAL  VALUES 

SMALL  PER  CENT  OF  SUPERIOR  ABILITY — IN  FRANCE, 
ENGLAND,  GERMANY — ABILITY  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES 
— ^THE  EIGHTY  PER  CENT  MIDDLE-MASS — PERSISTENCE 
OF   RACIAL    DIFFERENCES — ^THEIR    PART    IN    THE    WAR 

TURNING  from  the  fruitless  quest  for 
ability  among  the  great  multitudes  of 
the  earth's  inhabitants  to  an  examination  of 
the  more  promising  Aryan,  the  first  and  most 
striking  discovery  we  make  is  that  exceed- 
ingly few  individuals  among  these  dominant 
peoples  are  really  dominant.  The  active 
substance  of  civilization  is  involved  with  the 
destinies  of  a  mere  handful. 

Some  one  has  said  that  if  France  were  to 
lose  fifty  of  her  greatest  statesmen,  fifty  lead- 
ing scientists,  fifty  each  of  her  shining  lights 
in  education,  art,  music,  and  so  on,  there 
would  be  nothing  left  of  France.  This  states 
in  an  exaggerated  way  a  deep  truth  which  can 
be  far  more  convincingly  illustrated.  We 
may  continue  with  France  as  an  example,  al- 
ios 


ARYAN  RACIAL  VALUES 

though  the  case  fits  England,  Germany,  and 
America  as  welL 

The  population  of  France  is  about  forty 
millions.  Then,  instead  of  a  few  hundred, 
suppose  France  were  suddenly  to  lose  four 
hundred  thousand — one  per  cent — of  her  very 
best  in  human  values;  not  of  the  physically 
best,  such  as  are  being  lost  in  the  horrible 
war,  but  of  the  best  in  intellectual  and  crea- 
tive ability,  in  leadership,  in  genetic  worth. 
What  would  be  left  of  France  ?  Gather  in 
every  man  and  woman  in  France  who  leads, 
sustains,  creates,  and  brings  to  pass  the  things 
that  are  vital  to  her  life;  then  to  the  sum  of 
all  these  add  as  many  of  equal  potential 
worth,  who  in  the  nature  of  things  would 
succeed  them;  and  still  this  one-per-cent  con- 
scription of  France's  best  would  be  unfilled. 
Add,  again,  the  most  promising  child  in  every 
family  that  has  ever  produced  exceptional 
ability;  it  is  doubtful  whether  then  the  list  of 
four  hundred  thousand  would  be  complete. 

This  idea  is  so  pertinent  that  it  cannot  be 
impressed  too  strongly.  Take  the  illustration 
to  England — eliminate  a  half  million  of  her 
active  and  potential  leaders;  and  to  Germany 

109 


MANKIND 

— subtract  six  hundred  and  fifty  thousand 
from  her  best  genetic  values.  What  would 
be  left  of  Europe  ? 

Bring  it  home  to  our  own  United  States. 
One  per  cent  of  the  population  is  one  million. 
Ten  times  this  many  physically  fit  could  be 
raised  to  defend  their  country,  but  could  we 
find  a  quarter  of  one  million  who  have  a  vital, 
constructive  part  in  the  making  of  it .?  If  so, 
remove  these  from  the  nation's  life,  and  then, 
to  complete  the  lists,  three  times  as  many 
more  chosen  from  the  most  promising  of  the 
country's  blood.  What  would  be  left  of  the 
United  States .? 

A  smaller  unit  may  bring  the  idea  closer. 
In  New  York  City  is  supposed  to  be  concen- 
trated much  of  the  country's  ability.  A  list 
of  one  hundred  would  include  New  York's 
really  big  men.  The  names  of  not  more  than 
one  thousand  would  be  generally  recognized 
in  the  country  at  large  for  actual  achieve- 
ment. ''Who's  Who  in  America,"  with  its 
fine-tooth  comb,  finds  less  than  four  thousand 
men  and  women  worthy  of  its  not  too  dis- 
criminating pages.  New  York  is  popularly 
considered   as   swarming  with  financial   and 

no 


ARYAN  RACIAL  VALUES 

industrial  magnates.  Within  the  Kmits  of  a 
thousand  one  could  put  all  its  leaders  of 
finance  and  captains  of  industry,  and  still 
have  places  to  spare. 

Yet  the  toll  of  one  per  cent  would  call  for 
jorty  thousand  of  New  York's  best.  What 
would  be  left  of  New  York  .? 

It  seems  incredible  that  the  loss  of  only- 
one  individual  in  every  hundred  could  so 
devastate  human  values  in  any  vigorous  na- 
tion. But  we  are  wholly  misled  in  our  esti- 
mate of  a  nation's  strength  by  the  always 
satisfactory  proportion  of  its  physical  vigor. 
Physically,  a  people  can  hold  its  own  almost 
indefinitely.  In  the  physical  display  which 
any  active  nation  can  make  we  lose  sight  of 
the  rather  appalling  fact  that  its  construc- 
tively effective  brains  are  concentrated  in 
the  heads  and  inheritances  of  an  unbelievably 
small  number. 

It  may  be  contended  that  this  one  per  cent 
represents  only  as  much  of  the  world's  ability 
as  can  find  place  for  its  exercise,  and  that  from 
the  inexhaustible  masses  would  rise  greatness 
in  any  numbers  and  as  often  as  needed.  It  is 
true  that  a  nation's  resources  of  ability  in 

III 


MANKIND 

prospect  cannot  easily  be  defined.  Emer- 
gence is  from  every  walk  of  life,  and  often 
from  unexpected  places.  Yet  nothing  is  more 
absurd  than  the  notion  that  ability  is  apt 
to  come  from  any  sort  of  condition.  Because 
a  cabin  gave  us  our  greatest  President,  we 
need  not  set  our  eye  at  every  cabin  door  in 
expectation  of  another  Lincoln.  Ability  is 
never  careless  of  its  ancestry.  A  mind  capa- 
ble of  great  things  may  not  have  had  its 
origin  in  greatness,  but  it  must  have  had 
somewhere  in  its  line  strong,  well-ordered  in- 
heritances whose  character  units  in  happy 
combination  were  fitted  to  endow  it.  Trac- 
ing the  ancestral  lines  of  "self-made"  men, 
we  find  that  they  were  very  ably  assisted,  in- 
deed, at  the  most  critical  period  of  their  mak- 
ing.    There  are  no  self-made  men. 

There  can  be  no  serious  question  that  abil- 
ity descends  in  certain  lines  and  is  forever 
absent  from  other  lines.  The  facts  of  inheri- 
tance and  actual  experience  demonstrate  this. 
The  spread  of  opportunity  is  revealing  the 
resources  of  ability  by  bringing  it  more  gener- 
ally into  the  light.  The  insatiable  demand 
for  men  big  enough  to  take  leadership  may 

112 


ARYAN  RACIAL  VALUES 

miss  a  few  in  obscure  environments,  but  it  is 
constantly  missing  fewer. 

Thus  our  one  per  cent,  clearly  more  than  a 
full  measure  of  ability  disclosed,  becomes  a  fair 
index  of  a  people's  store  of  ability  in  prospect. 
Possibly  it  does  not  sufficiently  include  this 
ability  in  prospect;  for  every  person  matured 
there  must  be  more  than  two  or  three  in  the 
stages  of  minority.  Proper  allowance,  too, 
must  be  made  for  ability  obscured,  and  for 
resources  not  yet  tapped. 

Suppose  we  make  this  allowance  generously 
and  assume  that  for  every  individual  who  de- 
velops exceptional  capacity  there  are  ten 
sources  from  which  his  like  might  possibly 
rise;  in  other  words,  raise  our  estimate  of 
sustaining  inheritances  from  one  to  ten  per 
cent.  Then,  for  a  single  convincing  example, 
make  the  toll  from  Greater  New  York  ten 
per  cent— four  hundred  thousand  of  her  best 
in  genetic  values.  Does  the  wildest  optimist 
believe  that  New  York's  population  would 
then  hold  anything  more  of  racial  promise 
than  the  decadent  populations  of  the  Medi- 
terranean .? 

It  is  a  startling  thought  that  inheritances 
113 


MANKIND 

of  the  quality  essential  to  the  effective  main- 
tenance of  civilization  are  lodged  exclusively 
with  a  scant  ten  per  cent  of  the  population. 
Yet  that  is  the  logical  conclusion  if  we  ac- 
cept what  appear  to  be  plain  facts. 

Earlier  in  this  study  a  rough  estimate 
placed  ten  per  cent  of  our  own  population 
below  the  level  of  acceptable  citizenship;  now 
we  arrive  at  another  ten  per  cent  who  exceed 
that  modest  requirement.  Then  what  of  the 
great  middle-mass  of  eighty  per  cent,  who 
live  as  naturally  and  honestly  as  they  can  in 
difficult  surroundings  and  go  to  rest  in  ob- 
livion ? 

The  term  "acceptable  citizenship"  sets 
forth  their  worth  and  their  limitation.  They 
are  like  a  great  body  responding  to  the  incli- 
nations of  a  head;  their  willing  acceptance  of 
the  social  order  makes  little  demand  on  initia- 
tive. They  may  do  their  work  with  spon- 
taneity, but  they  keep  within  the  lines  of 
precedent.  In  an  advancing  civilization  they 
adopt  devices  which  they  could  not  devise, 
marvel  at  discoveries  which  they  could  not 
make,  and  reflect  among  themselves  the  light 
that  is  shed  upon  them.     They  take  the  stim- 

114 


ARYAN  RACIAL  VALUES 

ulus  of  their  daily  lives  from  a  higher  at- 
mosphere as  unconsciously  and  with  as  much 
right  as  they  breathe  the  free  air  of  heaven. 
The  great  scheme  of  civilization  is  for  them, 
not  of  them,  and  when  it  fails  they  settle  of 
their  own  weight  to  a  new  level  of  mediocrity. 

One  other  special  fact  with  respect  to  domi- 
nant branches  of  the  Aryan  should  be  im- 
pressed: the  persistence  of  characteristic  race 
differences  against  the  levelling  effect  of  an 
easily  diffused,  general  civilization. 

Centuries  of  race  differentiation  and  politi- 
cal readjustment  have  made  of  the  Aryan  a 
medley  of  unlike  peoples.  In  Europe,  state 
lines  follow  rather  imperfectly  the  natural 
cleavage  of  race  characteristics.  Take,  for 
example,  the  three  leading  national  groups — ■ 
English,  French,  German.  Only  a  partisan 
will  deny  that  the  chief  attainments  of  the 
world's  civilization  are  in  the  life  of  all,  though 
differently  interpreted  and  applied,  and  that 
each  has  contributed  after  its  own  manner  to 
the  general  advancement.  Yet  with  all  their 
acceptance  of  these  common  benefits,  strong 
character  resemblances  within   the   separate 


MANKIND 

states,  and  quite  at  variance  as  between  the 
states,  give  to  each  an  aspect  of  isolated  race 
unity.  The  words  German,  French,  EngHsh 
are  associated  in  our  minds  with  distinctive 
racial  characters.  These  impressions  are  based 
upon  fact,  and  there  need  be  no  prejudice  in 
them. 

The  statement  earHer  made  that  all  races 
may  be  regarded  as  contemporary,  and  differ 
in  their  attainments  because  of  long  diver- 
gence, holds  equally  true  for  these  Aryan 
peoples  now  on  essentially  the  same  level  of 
civilization.  Germany,  France,  and  England 
are  not  following  one  another  along  a  single 
scheme  of  development,  differing  because  at 
different  stages,  and  all  destined  eventually 
to  pass  through  similar  cultural  experiences. 
Each  has  come  to  flower  after  the  manner  in- 
duced by  its  own  particular  inheritance  values, 
and  is  not  destined  to  flower  again  after  the  man- 
ner of  any  other.  This  fact  is  vital  to  every 
forecast  of  Europe's  future.  German  character 
will  never  evolve  into  French  character,  and 
Englishmen  will  be  English  until  they  mix 
with  some  other  race  and  cease  to  be. 

These  racial  differences  did  no  more  than 
ii6 


ARYAN  RACIAL  VALUES 

assist  political  ambition  and  commercial  ri- 
valry in  bringing  about  the  present  cata- 
clysm. But  even  if  they  are  not  the  most 
poignant  of  all  that  have  made  Europe  a 
battle-field,  racial  differences  are  to  stand 
after  all  other  differences  have  given  way  to 
new  conditions  and  new  contentions.  Here 
again  is  the  immutability  of  the  character 
unit — that  fundamental  principle  set  down 
early  in  this  book  and  appearing  in  some 
form  at  almost  every  page. 

Thus  we  have  two  outstanding  character- 
istics of  the  dominant  Aryan  peoples : 

A  small  ten  per  cent  of  their  best  in  genetic 
values  stands  between  them  and  the  oblivion 
that  overtakes  every  people  bereft  of  capable 
leadership;  and 

Racial  divergence  limits  each  Aryan  group 
to  its  own  characteristic  interpretation  of  hu- 
man values. 

With  these  in  mind  we  may  now  take  a 
view  of  race  values  in  the  nations  involved  in 
the  great  war. 


117 


CHAPTER  XII 
THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  THE  ENTENTE 

A     RACIAL      SEARCH      WITHOUT      PREJUDICE — FRANCE — 
GREAT   BRITAIN — RUSSIA — RACE   SUICIDE 

IN  the  midst  of  a  frightful  conflict  bent  on 
determining  stupendous  political,  social, 
and  economic  issues,  this  delving  among  the 
contending  nations  for  racial  facts  may  seem 
like  picking  berries  in  a  forest  fire.  Yet  what- 
ever happens  to  everything  else,  the  facts  of 
race  are  to  be  the  facts  of  the  future — unad- 
justed in  the  general  adjustment,  sadly  dam- 
aged, of  course,  as  to  their  values,  but  even 
more  pronounced  in  their  antagonisms,  and 
as  persistent  as  ever  in  human  affairs. 

It  is  essential  that  we  do  not  let  our  opin- 
ions be  assailed  by  the  distressing  events  of 
the  day  if  we  are  to  get  a  sane  view  of  race 
values  in  the  nations  at  war.  Racial  differ- 
ences cannot  properly  be  viewed  through  the 
heat  of  all  the  other  differences  which  now 
afflict  the  world's  judgment.     This  search  is 

ii8 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  THE   ENTENTE 

concerned  with  the  war  only  as  it  touches 
the  question  of  racial  worth.  There  is  al- 
ready an  abundance  of  war  literature — most 
of  it  oblivious  to  the  racial  significances  in- 
volved. A  study  of  the  war  from  this  one 
neglected  view-point  has  no  apologies  to  offer 
for  its  incompleteness  as  a  general  picture. 

Who  in  1914  would  have  said  that  France 
could  stand  for  nearly  three  years  against 
assaults  beside  which  her  own  batterings  of 
the  Teuton  a  hundred  years  before  were  as 
child's  play  ?  Not  those,  surely,  who  mea- 
sure her  by  her  gay  capital.  But  in  this  crisis 
Frenchmen  may  thank  their  stars  that  Paris 
is  not  France,  and  that  of  leadership  they  still 
have  sufficient  to  fling  their  passive  millions 
against  the  enemy.  Yet  this  war,  won  or 
lost,  is  not  to  settle  the  destiny  of  France. 
The  destiny  of  every  nation  is  so  bound  up 
in  its  racial  values  that  it  can  laugh  at  the 
fortunes  of  war  as  temporary  disturbances  in 
the  long  course  of  its  existence.  This  is 
equivalent  to  what  has  been  said  in  effect 
before,  that  to  assail  a  nation  whose  racial 
strength  has  not  given  way  to  degeneration 

119 


MANKIND 

is  to  gain  little  more  than  an  expensive 
enemy. 

France  in  1871  was  racially  sound,  in  spite 
of  her  dissipations.  She  could  be  conquered, 
but  not  subdued.  Did  ever  a  nation  win  a 
prize  more  filled  with  burdensome  hate  than 
Alsace-Lorraine  and  the  gold  at  Spandau,  and 
profit  less  by  the  experience !  Again  in  1914 
Germany,  for  whom  attention  to  detail  is  a 
religion,  was  equally  blind  to  this  funda- 
mental consideration.  A  more  intelligent  es- 
timate of  France's  race  values  would  have 
shown  that  she  was  not  ready  to  die,  nor  to 
subdue  her  culture  to  the  tone  of  any  other, 
nor  even  to  give  up  any  part  of  her  country 
or  wealth  without  a  continuity  of  protest 
that  in  time  would  plague  her  conqueror  out 
of  more  than  its  value.  The  courageous  re- 
sponse of  the  French  to  the  frightful  de- 
mands of  this  war  has  given  France  a  new 
and  glorious  place  among  the  nations.  The 
French  temperament  has  turned  enthusiasm 
almost  to  ecstasy.  France  is  showing  a 
burst  of  new  life  that  thrills  the  world. 

And  yet  the  racial  prospects  of  France  are 
of  the  darkest.     It  is  true  that  Paris  is  not 

120 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  THE  ENTENTE 

France,  but  It  is  the  heart  of  France.  If 
Paris  does  not  represent  the  vast  outside 
population  of  France,  it  is  because  the  French- 
man who  is  not  touched  by  the  mode  of 
Paris  is  of  the  passive  millions.  Paris  typi- 
fies the  leadership  of  France;  it  is  to  her  dom- 
inant handful  that  she  appeals.  And  Paris, 
of  all  the  capitals  of  Europe,  is  farthest  on 
the  way  to  Babylon,  Memphis,  Athens,  and 
Rome — with  Vienna,  in  clumsy  swiftness,  a 
close  second. 

Race  mixture  has  not  been  much  of  a  de- 
generating influence  in  France.  Her  race 
values  have  gone  down  under  the  long-con- 
tinued failure  of  her  best  stocks  adequately 
to  perpetuate  themselves.  Compared  with 
the  other  great  nations  of  Europe,  France  has 
had  longer  periods  free  from  tormenting  wars 
— periods  given  over  to  the  advancement  of 
culture  and  to  the  enjoyment  of  it.  Luxury 
has  had  more  time  and  opportunity  to  play 
havoc  with  her  race  values,  and  in  this,  lux- 
ury has  been  assisted  by  the  very  quality  of 
French  temperament  which  has  made  the 
glory  of  French  culture.  No  new  blood  can 
come  to  France — her  resources  are  within  the 

121 


MANKIND 

realm.  Her  African  possessions  are  more  of 
a  drain  than  a  prop  to  her  racial  vitality. 
Her  decline  is  not  to  be  stayed  by  a  forced 
rise  in  the  birth-rate;  numbers  secured  in 
that  way  add  nothing  to  race  values.  Her 
j  handful  of  effectives  is  shrinking — as  those  of 
her  rivals  are  shrinking,  only  faster — and  no 
agitation  over  birth-rate  can  set  the  effectives 
of  France,  or  of  any  other  nation  for  that  mat- 
ter, to  mending  their  ways.  France  is  nearer 
to  the  critical  disproportion  between  her  con- 
structive and  non-constructive  elements  than 
either  of  her  greatest  rivals — England  and 
Germany.  We  can  speak  here  of  France  and 
England  as  rivals,  for  a  racial  study  may 
ignore  alliances  and  look  upon  war  as  a  dread- 
ful episode,  working  disaster  to  the  race 
values  of  all,  but  changing  little  the  race  rela- 
tion by  either  victory  or  defeat. 

But  racial  decline  is  a  sluggish  forerunner 
of  racial  collapse.  By  every  sign  discernible, 
France  is  equipped  to  hold  her  course  safely 
past  the  present  crisis,  safely  past  any  events 
within  our  reckoning.  We  may  estimate  her 
future  in  relation  to  that  of  other  peoples, 
but  not  in  years,  decades,  or  with  any  cer- 
tainty in  centuries. 

122 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  THE  ENTENTE 

The  outstanding  fact  for  this  inquiry  is 
that  France  is  not  to  be  a  source  of  future 
abihty  to  make  good  the  wastage  of  present 
civilization.  We  must  look  to  peoples  whose 
human  values  have  not  been  so  long  and  per- 
sistently exploited.  France's  contributions 
to  the  world's  advancement  may  continue, 
but  the  days  of  her  greatest  achievement  are 
in  the  past.  Long  before  the  world  is  over- 
hard  pressed  for  sustaining  race  values,  France 
will  have  ceased  to  be  a  dominant  factor  in 
its  civilization. 

Great  Britain  is  pre-eminently  the  country 
of  extremes  in  racial  values.  No  other  coun- 
try excels  her  in  the  production  of  able  men, 
in  the  adequacy  of  their  numbers,  and  the 
genetic  richness  of  the  stocks  from  which 
they  are  derived.  Yet  Great  Britain  has  a 
higher  proportion  of  ineffective,  underbred, 
hopelessly  inferior  white  stocks  than  any 
other  dominant  nation. 

We  are  not  interested  here  in  the  political 
significance  of  this  condition,  nor  in  the  sec- 
tional exclusiveness,  the  persistent  social  iso- 
lation of  types,  which  have  carried  differen- 
tiation of  genetic  values  in  Great  Britain  to 

123 


MANKIND 

unprecedented  lengths.     Let  us  take  the  con- 
dition as  it  exists. 

No  great  power  has  come  to  permanent 
disaster  solely  through  the  increase  of  its 
unsocial  population.  There  must  be  also  a 
drop  in  its  effective  values.  One  able  man 
outnumbers  a  hundred  ineffectives  in  the 
control  of  any  situation  not  actually  devel- 
oped into  a  riot — and  the  mob  is  the  most 
effervescent  of  any  manifestation  of  power. 
England  is  keenly  alive  to  the  threat  of  her 
racially  depreciated  masses — in  London's  East 
End,  in  Liverpool,  Manchester,  Glasgow,  in 
the  substratum  of  her  agrarian  population, 
and  throughout  all  her  manufacturing  and 
mining  regions;  not  the  steady  workers,  but 
the  hordes  of  intermittents  and  unworkables, 
effective  only  at  the  business  of  reproducing 
their  kind,  adding  misery  to  misery  unceas- 
ingly. They  make  for  England  a  social  prob- 
lem that  is  already  a  severe  tax  upon  her  re- 
sources of  control,  and  will  become  more  im- 
posing when  the  war  ends.  Yet  they  will 
never  get  their  hand  upon  Great  Britain's 
helm  until  failure  of  her  best  stocks  compels 
the  last  remnant  of  her  dominant  blood  to  let 

124 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  THE  ENTENTE 

go.  If  England  can  devise  a  way  to  reduce 
the  fecundity  of  her  ineffectives  she  may 
lighten  her  social  burden,  but  for  the  preser- 
vation of  her  national  life  she  must  look  to 
the  adequate  perpetuation  of  the  high  genetic 
values  which  supply  her  with  able  men. 

No  country  has  had  a  better  heritage. 
Engle,  Celt,  Saxon,  Norse,  Dane,  Norman — 
migrators,  invaders  all  of  them,  bred  under 
conditions  rigorous  In  their  selection  of  re- 
sourceful men.  If  we  hold  in  mind  the  per- 
sistence of  the  character  unit  unchanged 
through  the  centuries,  we  may  picture  the 
hardy  and  adventurous  of  these  stocks  as 
mingled  in  the  virile,  domineering  Englishman 
of  to-day. 

Those  who  have  any  knowledge  of  England 
will  not  even  have  to  ask  what  she  Is  doing 
with  her  rich  inheritances.  In  a  previous 
chapter  is  detailed  the  wasting  of  our  own 
purest  and  best  Aryan  inheritances.  That 
chapter  can  be  applied  to  English  stocks  with 
very  little  adaptation;  details  need  not  again 
be  entered  into.  England's  scheme  of  hered- 
itary titles  and  hereditary  wealth  sustain 
poor  genetic  values  in  high  places  along  with 

i2q 


MANKIND 

the  good,  perhaps  even  more  generally  than 
with  us,  but  in  the  main  the  decreasing  fer- 
tility of  Great  Britain's  higher  classes  aims 
directly  at  her  richest  inheritances. 

Thus  Great  Britain's  approach  toward  a 
critical  disproportion  between  her  sustaining 
and  her  socially  dependent  stocks  is  an  arith- 
metical certainty.  As  with  France,  the  time 
of  her  arrival  cannot  be  computed  in  years, 
or  decades,  or  centuries.  This  war  has  dis- 
closed the  remoteness,  not  the  nearness,  of 
her  downfall.  We  simply  know  that  the 
racial  values  of  Great  Britain  are  distinctly 
on  the  wane,  and  that  unless  something  oc- 
curs to  reverse  her  racial  trend  she  will  have 
been  counted  out  in  favor  of  less  debilitated 
peoples  long  before  the  world  loses  the  last 
of  its  Aryan  civilizations. 

But  the  superb  English  inheritance  has 
gone  to  all  parts  of  the  earth,  to  develop  the 
traditional  English  resourcefulness  long  after 
the  home  stock  shall  have  been  depleted  of 
its  effective  values.  England's  contribution 
to  the  world's  genetic  values  is  to  be  her 
crowning  achievement.  The  great  new  civ- 
ilizations in  North  America,  Australia,  New 

126 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  THE   ENTENTE 

Zealand,  South  Africa — In  the  generations  to 
come,  any  one  of  these  may  grow  to  be  an- 
other England  in  world  strength.  If  under  a 
new  conception  of  human  relations  these 
English-speaking  peoples  yield  their  small 
differences  and  get  together  in  singleness  of 
purpose,  the  dominating  world  civilization 
for  unnumbered  centuries  to  come  will  be 
English  in  language  and  in  those  qualities 
which  have  made  England  great.  Upon  this 
union  depends  the  survival  of  individualism 
in  its  most  wholesome  aspect. 

Russia,  because  it  is  a  land  of  immense 
numbers  and  unknown  racial  values,  is  popu- 
larly regarded  as  a  mighty  reservoir  of  human 
possibilities,  awaiting  only  better  environ- 
mental conditions  for  their  expression. 

This  is  presuming  on  ignorance.  Because 
Russian  capacities  seem  to  be  mostly  untried, 
it  is  not  safe  to  assume  either  that  they  do  or 
do  not  exist  in  quality  fitted  for  a  self-sustain- 
ing development.  The  Slavic  masses  of  Rus- 
sia, like  every  other  people  from  Hottentot  to 
finest  Aryan,  come  to  a  higher  level  of  exis- 
tence under  improved  conditions,  yet  we  have 

127 


MANKIND 

learned  that  very  few,  even  among  the  ablest 
races,  actually  contribute  to  the  maintenance 
of  that  higher  level.  Our  inquiry  is  not  for 
peoples  capable  of  receiving  from  civilization; 
it  is  for  the  few  capable  of  giving  to  it.  This 
indicates  the  question  which  we  now  ask  of 
Russia. 

To  begin  with,  we  must  distinguish  between 
the  numerous  and  variegated  Slavic  peoples 
of  Russia,  and  the  half-Teuton  handful  that 
not  only  dominates  but  is  the  Russian  Empire 
as  we  know  it,  so  closely  is  it  identified  with 
everything  constructive  in  Russian  life.  Rus- 
sia may  be  said  to  be  an  Asiatic  monster  with 
a  half-European  head.  It  is  in  the  monster, 
not  in  the  head,  that  Russia's  unknown  racial 
values  lie. 

Russia  embraces  a  most  heterogeneous 
population  of  one  hundred  and  fifty  million 
people,  two-thirds  Slavic,  nearly  one-third 
ranging  from  strong  infusion  of  Mongolian 
to  Aryan  mixtures  with  inferior  stocks  of 
unknown  origin.  In  the  absence  of  any  defi- 
nite racial  history,  we  are  compelled  to 
estimate  Russia's  inheritance  values  largely 
by  inference  from  the  degree  of  progress  she 

128 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  THE   ENTENTE 

has  made  in  her  contacts  with  other  peoples 
of  Europe. 

A  strong  argument  against  the  possession 
of  any  high  degree  of  initiative  and  creative 
capacity  by  the  Slav  is  in  the  very  fact  of  his 
continued  submission  to  domination  by  groups 
essentially  foreign  in  blood.  No  true  Aryan 
stocks  leave  the  expression  of  their  national, 
commercial,  and  industrial  life  so  generally 
to  a  foreign  element.  The  natural  inference 
from  this  condition  is  that  the  Slavic  inheri- 
tance does  not  well  compare  with  the  Teu- 
tonic in  the  qualities  adapted  for  taking  a 
leading  part  in  civilization. 

Another  convincing  evidence  of  the  Inferior 
quality  of  the  Slavic  inheritance  is  in  the 
slight  contribution  the  Slav  has  made  to  the 
world's  attainments.  From  her  manufactur- 
ing processes  to  her  art,  everything  that  is 
best  in  Russian  life  is  borrowed.  Even  the 
example  and  inspiration  of  his  European 
overlords  have  not  led  the  Slav  to  a  degree  of 
self-expression  that  gives  promise  of  any 
unusual  future  for  his  people. 

It  is  too  early — a  generation  too  early — to 
assume   that    the    recent    overthrow   of   the 

129 


MANKIND 

Czar  and  his  government  means  a  democracy 
for  Russia.  We  might  as  well  have  hailed 
Mexico  as  a  glorious  democracy  when  Maxi- 
milian fell.  Illiterate  Russia  has  many  years 
of  painful  struggle,  of  slow  education,  ahead 
of  her  before  she  can  even  determine  the 
capacity  of  her  suppressed  millions  for  self- 
government.  The  revolution  was  directed 
against  Germans  and  Pro-Germans;  there 
is  unquestionably  a  strong  Teutonic  infusion 
in  the  Slavic  upper  classes  that  is  Pro-Slavic, 
and  will  act  with  the  new  regime.  Russia 
may  have  a  more  liberal  government,  but 
for  years  to  come  it  will  be  such  as  the  Teu- 
tonic-Slavic ruling  class  chooses  to  give  her. 
True  democracy  is  a  dream  for  a  people 
three-quarters  of  whom  are  decades  away 
from  adequate  self-expression. 

To  whatever  heights  the  Slav  may  attain, 
the  indications  are  that  those  heights  will  be 
below  the  level  of  the  pure  Aryan.  No  per- 
sistent borrowers  or  imitators  of  the  Aryan 
civilization  are  destined  to  supplant  the  Aryan 
so  long  as  he  maintains  his  racial  integrity. 
Mere  numbers  will  never  command  his  hom- 
age. 

130 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  THE  ENTENTE 

There  is  a  vague  threat  to  racial  values  in 
Russia's  steadily  increasing  intimacy  with 
Aryan  Europe.  Intermixing  with  inferior 
stocks  has  had  a  large  part  in  the  downfall  of 
past  civilizations.  The  Russian  menace  is 
not  so  much  in  any  prospective  hostility,  as 
in  an  increased  participation  in  the  affairs  of 
Europe  which  may  lead  to  the  spread  of  her 
inferior  stocks  through  peoples  more  purely 
Aryan.  England  and  France  assume  a  grave 
responsibility  to  the  human  race  in  playing 
at  intimacy  with  a  nation  whose  masses  are 
racially  so  distinct  from  their  own. 

This  war  is  little  short  of  a  headlong  plunge 
into  race  suicide.  It  is  conceivable  that  a 
little  play-war  offering  adventure  abroad — 
like,  perhaps,  our  affair  with  Spain — might 
attract  a  high  proportion  of  roving  spirits 
whose  value  in  any  sustained  effort  at  home 
is  conspicuously  absent,  and  thus  not  mate- 
rially affect  racial  values.  But  a  war  that 
gathers  up  every  physical  and  mental  effective 
in  Europe  and  sets  them  to  fighting  each 
other  with  the  greatest  destructive  appliances 
ever  known,  killing  most  of  the  bravest  and 

131 


MANKIND 

best  and  letting  a  high  proportion  of  the  more 
timid  survive  to  assist  the  weakhngs  at  home 
in  perpetuating  the  race — that  war  sets  for- 
ward a  thousand  years  the  final  wind-up  of 
effective  humanity  on  earth.  It  is  safe  to 
say  that  among  the  millions  killed  will  be  a 
million  who  are  carrying  superlatively  effective 
inheritances — the  dependence  of  the  race's 
future.  Nothing  is  more  absurd  than  the 
notion  that  these  inheritances  can  be  replaced 
in  a  few  generations  by  encouraging  the  fe- 
cundity of  the  survivors.  They  are  gone  for- 
ever. The  survivors  are  going  to  reproduce 
their  own  less  valuable  kind.  Words  fail  to 
convey  the  appalling  nature  of  this  loss. 


132 


CHAPTER  XIII 
THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  GERMANY 

THE     GERMAN    ARYAN A    DISTINCTIVE     STOCK — CAUSES 

OF  GERMAN  ALOOFNESS — PRUSSIANISM — GERMANY'S 
ADVANTAGE  IS  YOUTH,  NOT  INHERITANCE — DEGENER- 
ATING  INFLUENCES GERMANS   AND    ENGLISH   OF  THE 

FUTURE 

GERMANY,  from  the  view-point  of  racial 
values,  is  the  most  interesting  of  all  the 
Aryan  groups  in  Europe.  In  development  of 
her  inheritance  she  is  the  youngest — and 
youth  is  always  full  of  possibilities. 

Speculation,  with  some  show  of  probability, 
ascribes  the  origin  of  the  Germanic  peoples  to 
the  later  Aryan  migrations  into  Northern 
Europe.  The  strength  and  richness  of  their 
Aryan  inheritance  has  been  fully  demon- 
strated, and  its  value  as  a  component  part  of 
the  ascendant  Aryan  blood  is  not  to  be  much 
changed  by  the  fortunes  of  this  war,  however 
Germany's  relation  to  other  Powers  may  be 
affected.  As  a  people  that  is  unquestionably 
destined  for  a  longer  activity  than  some  other 
Aryan  peoples,  it  is  necessary  that  we  discuss 

133 


MANKIND 

frankly  and  without  prejudice  the  quahties 
which  are  distinctively  characteristic  of  the 
German. 

In  the  ceaseless  mixings  that  have  made 
distant  cousins  of  all  Aryan  peoples,  the  ten- 
dency of  these  later  arrivals  was  to  do  their 
mixing  through  overflowing  westward  upon 
other  peoples,  and  to  maintain  the  integrity 
of  the  original  stocks  against  influx  of  foreign 
blood.  This  is  particularly  true  of  Germans 
in  their  later  history;  German  kinships  with 
foreign  peoples  are  mostly  on  foreign  soil. 
Germans  are  in  no  sense  purer  Aryan  than 
the  English  and  French,  but  they  are  not  so 
much  a  product  of  intermixture  of  Aryans 
once  differentiated  from  each  other.  They 
owe  few  of  their  characteristics  to  Aryans 
other  than  their  original  stock.  Thus  Ger- 
man kinship  with  Aryan  peoples  is  especially 
remote;  in  his  inheritance  the  German  is  the 
most  pronounced  foreigner  in  Europe. 

The  racial  isolation  of  Germany  has  been 
accentuated  by  a  number  of  events  in  her 
history.  Until  long  after  other  European 
Powers  had  achieved  a  unity  of  their  respec- 
tive elements  which  made  possible  a  fair  de- 

134 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:   GERMANY 

gree  of  individual  development,  the  present 
Germany  remained  a  people  divided  against 
itself  into  petty  states,  warring  and  warred 
upon,  the  frequent  victims  of  each  other  and 
of  their  more  powerful  neighbors.  Under 
these  conditions  anything  more  than  sporadic 
expressions  of  German  inheritance  values  was 
impossible.  Theirs  was  a  case  of  arrested 
development.  Their  centuries  of  vicissitudes 
tended  to  make  the  Germans,  naturally  an 
introspective  people,  more  self-centred,  and  to 
harden  the  racial  lines  between  them  and 
other  European  peoples.  Although  constant 
wars  made  a  severe  drain  upon  their  best 
stocks,  the  German  peoples  were  held  al- 
most continuously  to  the  rigorous  conditions 
of  living  which  make  for  the  survival  of 
strength  and  resourcefulness.  They  were  still 
gathering  nation-building  forces  while  others 
were  well  along  into  the  stages  of  dissipating 
them.  When  the  unifying  of  her  peoples  gave 
Germany  her  opportunity  for  development, 
she  was  ready  for  it  with  a  wealth  of  untried 
inheritance  values  backed  by  the  enthusiastic 
eagerness  of  youth. 

Modern  Germany  could  not  have  timed  her 
I3S 


MANKIND 

arrival  to  better  advantage.  It  coincided  al- 
most exactly  with  that  burst  of  achievement 
which  began  less  than  a  century  ago  and  set 
the  whole  world  at  the  business  of  developing 
its  individuals.  Germany  entered  upon  this 
outpouring  of  the  world's  ability  with  her  own 
store  of  genius  comparatively  untouched. 
She  soon  gathered  the  impetus  of  her  unduly 
retarded  development.  She  had  far  to  rise, 
and  her  rise  to  the  level  of  the  other  great 
Aryan  Powers  was  spectacular  even  for  this 
era  of  spectacular  achievements. 

The  rapidity  of  Germany's  advance  has  im- 
pressed the  world.  It  impressed  her  rivals 
more  particularly.  Most  of  all,  and  signifi- 
cantly, it  impressed  the  German  people  them- 
selves. Perhaps  none  of  her  rivals  could  have 
gone  through  the  unique  experiences  of  Ger- 
many and  kept  their  heads.  Certainly  Ger- 
mans did  not.  In  few  words,  Germany  came 
into  her  own  in  a  cloud  of  self-conceit,  the  like 
of  which  has  never  before  afflicted  a  whole 
people.  It  befogs  their  relations  with  other 
peoples  and  locks  them  up  in  their  own  circle 
of  ideals. 

So  far  we  have  three  causes  for  the  dis- 
136 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  GERMANY 

tinctiveness  of  the  German  character:  the 
remoteness  of  his  connection  with  other 
Aryan  stocks;  the  long  period  of  his  sup- 
pression, and  the  upward  twist  given  to  his 
self-esteem  by  the  perfectly  logical  rapidity 
of  his  development. 

The  first  and  chief  of  these  is  racial. 
Heredity  is  the  fundamental  reason  for  those 
characteristics  which  will  always  distinguish 
a  German;  it  determines  that  part  of  his 
mental  make-up  which  will  live  and  die  with 
him.  This  statement,  attempting  no  def- 
inition of  what  these  characteristics  are, 
ought  to  please  both  Germans  and  their 
critics;  Germans  should  find  satisfaction  in 
the  racial  basis  for  the  qualities  which  they 
admire  in  themselves,  while  their  critics, 
having  in  mind  other  German  traits,  will  be 
confirmed  in  their  view  that  Germans  are  an 
incorrigible  lot.  The  neutral  opinion  would 
be  that,  just  as  the  German  has  demonstrated 
the  richness  of  his  inheritance,  he  has  dem- 
onstrated its  limitations,  its  variance  from 
other  inheritances. 

But  the  factor  in  Germany's  estrangement 
from  her  sister  Aryan  peoples,  overshadowing 

137 


MANKIND 

all  these  three  and  setting  her  ofiF  as  of  a  dif- 
ferent race,  is  Prussianism,  and  all  that  Prus- 
sianism  stands  for  in  the  ethics  of  human 
relations. 

We  are  not  interested  here  in  the  political 
aspects  of  Prussianism,  but  in  the  fact  that  it 
is  a  phenomenon  distinctly  racial  in  character. 
The  Prussian  type  is  not  wholly  an  environ- 
mental differentiation  from  the  Germanic 
stock.  It  bears  evidence  of  more  remote  and 
more  fundamental  character  differences  than 
could  thus  come  to  it.  The  Prussian  inheri- 
tance is  of  sterner  texture  than  that  of  the 
other  Germanic  stocks.  The  sculpturally  hid- 
eous row  of  the  Sieges  Allee  is  not  the  expres- 
sion of  one  egoist's  dangerous  mediaevalism, 
but  of  the  whole  Prussian  type.  The  astound- 
ingly  cold-blooded  militarism  of  Bernhardi, 
oblivious  almost  beyond  belief  to  those  human 
rights  which  are  the  ethical  basis  of  civiliza- 
tion, finds  enthusiastic  response  among  the 
elect  of  Prussianism. 

It  is  to  the  domination  of  this  essentially 
foreign  and  least  cultural  element  in  Germanic 
character  that  intellectual  Germany  has  given 
herself.     The  rise  of  that  leadership  happened 

138 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  GERiMANY 

to  coincide  with  the  advent  of  the  world's 
greatest  opportunity  for  development.  This 
opportunity  would  have  come  to  the  German 
people  as  it  came  to  all  other  strong  Aryan 
peoples;  yet  its  coincident  arrival  with  Prus- 
sian militarism  and  the  rigid,  non-individual- 
istic administrative  system  which  joins  with 
militarism  to  produce  Kultur  seems  to  have 
convinced  introspective,  docile,  scientific  Ger- 
many that  it  is  to  Prussia  that  she  owes  her 
phenomenal  progress.  Some  day  she  may 
truly  estimate  the  skilful  manipulator  of 
conditions  which  were  of  themselves  evolving 
modern  Germany. 

In  another  and  significant  respect  Prussian- 
ism  is  involved  in  the  racial  destinies  of 
Europe.  Its  oft-avowed  attitude  of  hostile 
impatience  toward  every  people  and  every  in- 
stitution that  stands  in  the  way  of  German 
ambition;  its  devotion  to  the  doctrine  of  force 
as  the  mainspring  of  Kultur;  its  forty  years  of 
peace  in  sinister  preparation  for  "Der  Tag" 
— the  Day  that  is  now  upon  us;  these  were 
the  prime  elements  in  the  long-gathering 
cloud  that  finally  burst  over  Europe.  It  was 
apprehension  of  these   that   had   large   part 

139 


MANKIND 

with  the  baser  motives  of  vengeful  France 
and  calculating  England  in  bringing  about 
their  wholly  unnatural,  unracial  alliance  with 
Russia,  and  lent  the  color  of  justification  to  a 
pact  otherwise  unjustifiable  in  a  civilized 
people.  Prussianism  unwittingly  forced  the 
pact;  the  pact  In  turn  stirred  the  hate  of  Ger- 
many and  fixed  irrevocably  the  designs  of 
Prussianism.  Who  shall  say  that  the  guilt 
belongs  chiefly  to  the  one  or  to  the  other  ?  It 
is  sufiicient  to  say  that  If  the  events  of  this 
war  make  easier  the  racial  mixing  of  Russia's 
semi-Asiatic  hordes  with  Aryan  Europe,  the 
failure  of  Europe's  Powers  to  set  the  protec- 
tion of  their  Aryan  inheritance  above  all 
other  ambitions  will  have  been  the  most  stu- 
pendous failure  in  the  history  of  mankind. 

In  these  various  ways  German  aloofness 
was  promoted.  In  strong  contrast  is  the 
racial  history  of  English  character.  It  Is  only 
in  mixture  of  superior  with  inferior  stocks 
that  a  depreciated  race  results;  the  mingling, 
as  in  England,  of  dlff^erent  but  equally  vigor- 
ous and  resourceful  stocks  results  in  a  race 
not  only  unimpaired,  but   equipped  with   a 

140 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  GERMANY 

wide  range  of  characteristics  derived  from  its 
component  elements.  In  her  formative  pe- 
riod, England's  racial  experience  was  one  the 
direct  opposite  of  isolation.  It  is  quite  con- 
ceivable that  a  race  built  upon  her  broad 
foundations  would  have  a  better  comprehen- 
sion of  racial  differences  than  one,  like  Ger- 
many, which  derived  its  characteristics  from 
a  more  exclusive  source  and  has  continuously 
inbred  them  under  unique  conditions. 

This  breadth  of  view  in  her  human  rela- 
tions has  attended  England's  centuries  of 
conquest  and  made  possible  the  British  Em- 
pire. She  has  the  faculty  for  mitigating  the 
injustices  of  her  most  flagrant  seizures  of  ter- 
ritory with  an  understanding  of  racial  differ- 
ences so  practical  and  satisfying  that  protest 
cannot  make  effective  headway  against  her. 
The  most  striking  example  of  this  is  the  most 
recent — that  of  the  Boer  colonies;  an  outraged 
people  brought  to  a  semblance  of  loyalty  after 
a  few  years  of  wise  administration. 

It  is  no  reflection  on  Germany's  ability  In 
other  respects  that  she  has  not  this  compre- 
hension of  inheritance  values  other  than  her 
own.     Germany  herself  admits  an  exasperat- 

141 


MANKIND 

ing  proportion  of  failures  in  her  diplomatic 
and  colonizing  relations;  and  most  other  civi- 
lized peoples  seem  now  to  be  in  agreement  that 
German  domination  over  any  but  Germans 
would  be  impracticable.  In  a  word,  they  do 
not  feel  that  Germany  could  impose  her  con- 
trol upon  a  foreign  people  without  attempt- 
ing in  her  enthusiasm  to  impose  the  whole 
rigid  German  institution.  No  more  irritating 
failure  can  be  conceived  than  an  individual- 
istic people  stretched  to  fit  the  unyielding 
framework  of  Kultur. 

Germany  herself  is  the  greatest  sufferer 
from  her  inelastic  attitude  toward  the  ideals 
of  other  peoples.  It  is  not  commercial  rivalry 
that  has  turned  the  world's  opinion  against 
her.  Every  neutral  nation  has  in  England  a 
greater  rival;  and  surely  English  history  can- 
not have  attracted  their  favor.  England  has 
appropriated  all  the  parcels  of  earth  of  espe- 
cial interest  to  her,  and  is  quite  ready  to  set- 
tle down.  To-day  she  is  in  the  position  of  a 
prosperous  burglar,  viewing  old  age  some  dis- 
tance ahead,  who  takes  to  preaching  on  the 
iniquity  of  breaking  and  entering.  Yet  she 
is  forgiven  her  sins  because  of  the  world  bene- 

142 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  GERMANY 

fits  which  have  come  from  her  prosperity. 
The  very  thought  of  Britannia  ruHhg  the  seas 
should  make  righteous  Aryans  mad.  But 
they  are  scarcely  provoked  because  they  feel 
that  if  she  did  not,  some  other  power  would 
rule  them  worse. 

Germany's  day  will  come  when  she  pierces 
the  armor  of  her  self-conceit  and  sees  the  light 
of  other  peoples.  She  has  no  failures  in  her 
commercial  relations.  She  meets  the  for- 
eigner in  his  own  language,  and  makes  goods 
exactly  to  suit,  at  the  same  time  scarcely  ap- 
preciating any  of  his  ideals.  Germany  has 
no  warrant  for  this  attitude.  There  is  not 
the  slightest  evidence  that  her  Aryan  inheri- 
tance is  filled  with  greater  possibilities  of  de- 
velopment than  any  other.  It  does  not  fol- 
low that,  because  she  has  risen  speedily  under 
the  pressure  of  conditions,  she  is  to  shoot  up 
to  cultural  heights  not  already  attained. 
Germany's  coming  may  be  likened  to  the  fill- 
ing of  an  empty  reservoir  from  its  overfull 
neighbors.  The  water  rushes  spectacularly, 
but  with  all  its  roar  it  does  not  rise  a  thou- 
sandth of  an  inch  above  the  level  of  its  source. 
Germany  owes  much  of  her  rise  to  an  inpour- 

143 


MANKIND 

ing  of  the  world's  attainments,  if  she  would 
but  know  It.  She  has  drawn  liberally  from 
the  common  source  to  bring  herself  so  quickly 
to  the  common  level.  Her  achievements  have 
been  In  the  nature  of  perfecting  and  extending 
the  scope  of  the  creations  of  others,  rather 
than  in  creating.  The  progress  of  unified 
Germany  is  more  Identified  with  the  material 
trappings  of  civilization  and  the  development 
of  German  Kultur  than  with  the  sort  of  cul- 
ture which  is  civilization  itself.  In  literature, 
art,  music,  philosophy,  modern  Germany  has 
not  matched  the  achievements  of  her  own 
pre-empire  days.  Least  of  all  the  German 
states  has  Prussia,  the  builder  of  the  Empire 
and  the  chief  exponent  of  Kultur,  contributed 
to  the  world's  cultural  attainments. 

Germany's  advantage  is  in  the  newness  of 
her  vigor,  the  abundance  of  her  developed 
ability,  and  the  small  proportion  of  her  hu- 
man dross.  Germany  has  mistaken  these  for 
symptoms  of  racial  superiority.  While  there 
is  nothing  in  them  to  raise  the  world's  civili- 
zation into  realms  unattalned,  they  do  assure 
to  Germany  a  very  significant  length  and 
strength  of  racial  life  for  the  attainment  of 

144 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  GERMANY 

those  ideals  of  which  the  German  inheritance 
is  capable.  They  give  to  the  German  a  sur- 
vival value  which  other  Aryan  stocks  in  Eu- 
rope do  not  possess.  For  this  reason  an  esti- 
mate of  Germany's  exceptional  prospects  for 
survival  should  be  of  especial  interest. 

It  is  inconceivable  that  Prussianism  is  to 
survive  the  present  war.  The  solidarity  that 
comes  to  a  people  with  war  is  a  pleasing  spec- 
tacle, but  it  is  essentially  an  arrangement  for 
the  purposes  of  war,  and  not  a  lasting  ac- 
quirement. A  truer  estimate  of  a  nation's 
unity  may  be  based  upon  conditions  preced- 
ing war,  for  under  war's  forced  attitude  of 
harmony  grievances  accumulate  and  serve 
afterward  to  intensify  old  discords. 

One-third  of  Germany's  population  has  for 
years  refused  to  accept  the  degree  of  indi- 
vidual self-effacement  demanded  by  her  over- 
lords. The  bogie  lying  in  wait  for  Prussian- 
ism is  in  the  thinking  millions  now  fighting 
its  battles.  Twice  beaten  is  the  government 
that  must  return  empty-handed  from  war  to 
the  pent-up  antagonisms  of  its  dissenting  ele- 
ments. There  is  good  prospect  that  Ger- 
many's prize  from  this  war  is  to  be  emergence 

HS 


MANKIND 

from  Prusslanism  into  a  more  companionable 
relation  with  other  peoples  and  a  broader 
usefulness  as  coinheritor  of  the  matchless 
Aryan  blood. 

The  spring  of  1917  may  be  too  early  to 
bid  final  adieu  to  Prussianism,  but  whatever 
happens,  one  great  result  of  the  war  is  to  be 
Germany's  awakening  to  a  broader  apprecia- 
tion of  other  Aryan  peoples.  If  with  that 
more  amiable  outlook  upon  the  world  comes 
a  greater  degree  of  co-operation,  the  way  will 
be  opened  to  a  still  more  effective  demonstra- 
tion of  the  German  inheritance. 

For  no  disaster  coming  from  this  war  can 
take  away  Germany's  fundamental  advantage 
of  youth;  neither  can  the  winning  of  it  infuse 
new  blood  into  nations  feeling  the  initial  pal- 
sies of  age.  In  the  last  analysis,  when  the 
memory  of  the  war  has  dimmed,  survival  will 
be,  as  it  has  always  been,  of  those  who  best 
maintain  the  purity,  strength,  and  proportion 
of  their  effective  stocks.  Yet  it  is  an  impres- 
sive fact  that  after  the  war  Germany  will  face 
a  universality  of  condemnation  and  distrust 
such  as  is  usually  reserved  for  outlaw  peoples 
who  care  nothing  for  the  world's  opinion. 

146 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  GERMANY 

In  the  ordinary  course,  Germany's  initial 
advantage  would  carry  her  racial  values  cen- 
turies beyond  those  of  either  England  or 
France.  But  we  know  that  the  ordinary 
course  of  human  events  took  a  most  perplex- 
ing turn  during  the  last  century,  and  is  now 
running  no  one  knows  exactly  whither;  yet 
there  are  signs  by  which  we  can  to  some  extent 
estimate  the  future  of  German  racial  values. 

We  have  seen  that  extraordinary  conditions 
came  upon  the  new  Germany  and  bore  her  in 
a  half  century  through  centuries  of  develop- 
ment. The  age-old  inclination  of  the  human 
to  look  upon  achievement  and  turn  from 
decay  leads  one  to  forget  that  along  with 
Germany's  rapid  advance  travelled  all  the 
degenerative  influences  which  afflict  civiliza- 
tion. Germany  faces  to-day,  only  somewhat 
more  distantly  than  her  neighbors,  the  spectre 
of  degeneration  that  is  in  the  wake  of  every 
civilized  people.  Her  serious  concern  over 
falling  birth-rate,  increase  of  ineffectives,  and 
spread  of  sensuous  indulgence  indicates  that 
the  racial  problems  of  France  and  England 
are  rapidly  becoming  the  racial  problems  of 
Germany. 

147 


MANKIND 

Germany's  survival  values  can  be  more 
safely  measured  against  those  of  other  peoples 
than  in  terms  of  years  or  centuries.  In  cast- 
ing about  for  comparisons,  it  becomes  evident 
that  Europe  has  no  stock  that  seems  to  prom- 
ise the  lasting  quality  of  the  German.  But 
in  America,  Australia,  New  Zealand — in  the 
stocks  which  for  centuries  have  been  going 
out  from  Great  Britain  to  develop  her  posses- 
sions— there  is  the  vigor  and  richness  of  genetic 
values  that  usually  attend  migration  and  se- 
lective development  under  natural  conditions. 
These  stocks  bid  for  a  future  in  every  way 
comparable  with  the  future  of  the  German. 

Then,  in  that  future,  is  it  to  be  this  fresh 
English-speaking  giant  of  many  lands  against 
the  German  ?  But  why  must  racial  differ- 
ence and  the  impediment  of  language  forever 
separate  the  creative  forces  of  the  world  into 
opposing  camps  ? 

We  do  not  know  why.  We  only  know  that 
so  far  in  the  history  of  mankind  unlikenesses 
of  tongue  and  inheritance  have  steadily  re- 
sisted the  plain  teachings  of  reason  and 
philosophy;  and  now  the  religion  of  Jesus 
Christ  has  given  way  to  frantic  appeal  to 

148 


THE  NATIONS  AT  WAR:  GERMANY 

a  God  who  may  be  anything  from  Mars  to 
Mammon,  according  to  the  particular  desire 
that  is  in  the  soul  of  the  man  who  utters  it. 

It  is  more  the  voicing  of  a  fervent  world 
longing  than  a  justifiable  hope,  that  sometime 
a  new  vision  of  man's  purpose  on  earth — a 
vision  unhampered  by  miracle  and  mysticism 
— may  come  to  these  two  greatest  of  all  Aryan 
peoples  and  unite  them  in  complete  under- 
standing for  the  attainment  of  a  more  endur- 
ing civilization  than  the  world  has  yet  seen. 
The  preachers  of  hate  and  force  should  die 
with  this  war;  but  would  that  more  enduring 
civilization  come  to  peoples  unstirred  by 
racial  differences  ?  The  question  leads  into 
regions  beyond  our  present  inquiry.  We  may 
only  conclude  that  unless  human  nature  itself 
gets  a  revolutionary  twist,  the  chief  vitalizers 
of  the  civilization  to  come  will  be  speakers  of 
German  and  speakers  of  English;  in  what 
relation,  no  one  knows. 

But  this  much  we  may  learn,  if  we  open 
our  minds  to  it:  wars  may  alter,  hasten,  or 
postpone,  but  they  settle  nothing  in  the  larger 
current  of  human  affairs;  the  final  determiner 
is  racial  value.     The  people,  English  or  Ger- 

149 


MANKIND 

man,  which  in  some  way  effects  the  adequate 
survival  of  its  superlatively  effective  stocks, 
will  not  need  to  make  war  eventually  to  pos- 
sess the  earth. 

Now  we  turn  to  those  speakers  of  English 
who  went  out  from  Great  Britain  to  the 
new  lands  of  the  earth;  beginning  with  the 
earliest  and  most  numerous  of  them  all — 
our  own  people.  More  particularly  we  shall 
examine  them  with  respect  to  their  racial 
prospects,  since  that  is  to  determine  more 
than  anything  else  their  place  in  the  future 
world  civilization. 


150 


CHAPTER  XIV 
AMERICA:  THE  MELTING-POT 

MAKING  OF  THE  AMERICAN  TYPE — RACE  MIXTURES — 
THE  INDIAN-WHITE — DUAL  PERSONALITY — MELTING- 
POT  CAN  ONLY  MIX,  NOT  FUSE — MONGRELISM — MIX- 
TURES  OF   UNLIKE  TYPES 

"TT7E,  the  people  of  the  United  States," 
▼  V  assembled  from  all  quarters  of  the 
globe,  proclaim  among  other  things  that  we 
are  engaged  in  the  experiment  of  administer- 
ing the  most  individualistic  system  of  govern- 
ment on  earth  to  the  most  diverse  population 
ever  got  together.  And  nineteen-twentieths 
of  us  who  have  enough  intelligence  to  recog- 
nize the  effort  as  an  experiment  indicate,  by 
calling  it  so,  our  cocksureness  of  success — 
else  we  would  not  utter  the  word  aloud. 

We  are  primarily  inheritors  of  English 
blood.  The  qualities  handed  down  to  us  by 
our  English-speaking  ancestry  are  the  quali- 
ties which  have  made  our  greatness.  No 
other  inheritance  has  had  conspicuous  part  in 
American  achievement.     What  is  to  be  Amer- 

151 


MANKIND 

ica's  destiny  as  coinheritor  of  England's  gen- 
erous contribution  to  the  world's  racial  values  ? 

Mixing  of  diverse  peoples,  the  thing  written 
large  on  the  tombstones  of  departed  civiliza- 
tions, we  hail  as  the  means  for  evolving  an 
American  type.  Magnificent  courage,  this, 
blended  with  an  altruism  that  knows  nothing 
of  heredity. 

Because  of  America's  unusual  opportunities 
for  self-expression,  our  so-called  Melting-Pot 
may  seem  for  a  time  to  yield  more  of  racial 
values  than  are  put  into  it.  Since  the  begin- 
ning, every  civilization  has  attempted  to  off- 
set its  racial  losses  by  increasing  the  develop- 
ment of  the  individual.  But  never  before  has 
a  nation  deliberately  Invited  the  spectre  of 
race  mixture  to  its  vitals,  and  staked  Its  future 
racial  values  on  the  proposition  that  two  and 
two  make  six  or  ten,  according  to  the  degree 
of  optimism  prevailing  at  the  moment. 

To  begin  with,  we  must  understand  the 
true  significance  of  race  mixture.  Take,  for 
an  extreme  example,  the  union  of  two  diverse 
races — the  American  Indian  and  the  White 
man.  This  is  a  mingling  within  a  single  being 
of  characteristics  which  have  been  strangers  to 

152 


AMERICA:  THE  MELTING-POT 

each  other  for  ages  unknown.  Here  once  more 
we  must  call  to  mind  the  persistence  of  the 
character  unit.  Even  in  this  most  intimate 
relation  these  very  unlike  character  units,  In- 
dian and  White,  go  on  through  the  generations 
unchanged.  The  half-blood  Indian  is  not  in 
reality  a  creature  midway;  he  is  a  mixture  of 
characteristics  as  purely  Indian  and  as  purely 
White  as  if  they  had  found  companionship  in 
a  being  wholly  of  their  own  kind.  In  out- 
ward appearance  he  is  a  blend  of  Indian  and 
White  complexions  and  features — an  apparent 
development  of  a  new  and  distinct  type — but 
in  mental  response  to  environment  there  is 
strong  suggestion  of  the  dual  personality 
which  we  know  actually  exists  in  him. 

The  curious  persistence  in  the  half-blood  of 
habits  exclusively  characteristic  of  the  White 
came  to  the  writer's  attention  a  dozen  years 
ago  during  a  close  study  of  the  Indian,  in  the 
preparation  of  a  sympathetic  history  of  cer- 
tain Northwestern  tribes.  The  values  which 
had  survived  in  the  Northwestern  Indian 
were  those  adapted  to  the  rather  improvident 
life  of  the  hunter — the  dependant  upon  the 
chance  of  the  hour  for  subsistence.     He  had 

153 


MANKIND 

few  of  the  characteristics  which  distinguish 
the  White  man  as  a  creature  chiefly  occupied 
in  looking  after  his  future  needs;  during  the 
ages  of  his  separate  development,  those  char- 
acteristics seem  to  have  been  bred  out  from 
the  inheritance  of  the  Indian  about  as  effec- 
tually as  opposite  and  equally  persistent  in- 
fluences have  bred  them  into  the  White  man's 
inheritance.  Now,  the  experience  of  Indian 
agents  as  given  in  reports  year  after  year 
shows  that  it  was  always  the  half-blood  who 
evinced  a  spontaneous  desire  for  a  garden  and 
crops;  the  half-blood  who  voluntarily  looked 
after  and  protected  his  live  stock.  And  the 
same  reports  show  that  the  full-blood  acquired 
these  habits  with  the  greatest  difficulty,  and 
was  held  to  a  perfunctory,  uncomprehending 
exercise  of  them  only  by  vigilant  and  unceas- 
ing oversight.  Both  were  required  by  gov- 
ernment agents  to  learn  the  White  man's  way; 
the  whole  point  is  in  the  spontaneity  of  the 
half-blood's  adaptation,  and  in  the  full-blood's 
lack  of  it. 

The  half-blood's  voluntary  exercise  of  hab- 
its exclusively  of  the  White  man  is  a  man- 
ifestation of  his  White  inheritance;  the  Indian 

154 


AMERICA:  THE  MELTING-POT 

in  him  would  never  have  impelled  him  to  it. 
This  is  merely  one  illustration  of  the  profound 
fact  that,  even  in  their  most  discordant  mix- 
ings, character  units  neither  blend  nor  lose 
their  identity,  nor  is  a  single  new  one  formed. 
So  it  is  with  any  mixture  of  unlike  peoples. 
What  appears  to  the  eye  as  a  blend  is  an  inti- 
mate mixture  in  new  combination,  exactly  as 
in  individuals  deriving  their  inheritances  from 
a  single  race. 

Thus  our  "Melting- Pot"  would  not  give 
us  in  a  thousand  years  what  enthusiasts  ex- 
pect of  it — a  fusing  of  all  our  various  racial 
elements  into  a  new  type  which  shall  be  the 
true  American.  It  will  give  us  for  many  gen- 
erations a  perplexing  diversity  in  ancestry, 
and  since  our  successors  must  reach  back  into 
that  ancestry  for  characteristics,  this  diversity 
will  increase  the  uncertainty  of  their  inheri- 
tances. They  will  inherit  no  stable  blended 
character,  because  there  is  no  such  thing. 
They  will  inherit  from  a  mixture  of  unlike 
characteristics  contributed  by  unlike  peoples, 
and  in  their  inheritance  they  will  have  certain 
of  these  characteristics  in  full  identity,  while 
certain  others  they  will  not  have  at  all. 

155 


MANKIND 

There  is  nothing  new  in  this.  It  is  a  com- 
monly recognized  phenomenon  in  promiscu- 
ously bred  domestic  animals,  and  is  known 
as  mongrelism.  Every  breeder  knows  that 
there  is  no  telling  what  kind  of  chicks  or  cat- 
tle will  spring  from  the  persistently  mixed 
stocks  of  a  careless  farmer.  They  may  resem- 
ble neither  their  parents  nor  each  other  in 
size,  color,  or  general  characteristics,  because 
of  the  confused  nature  of  the  germ-plasmic 
streams  from  which  they  draw  their  inheri- 
tances. Nothing  short  of  generations  of  se- 
lective breeding  for  specific  characteristics  will 
bring  back  such  stocks  to  a  reasonably  stable 
inheritance. 

In  the  case  of  man,  nature  spent  untold 
ages  in  selective  breeding  of  White,  Yellow, 
and  Black  to  bring  each  to  a  fairly  stable  in- 
heritance— to  a  degree  of  unity  in  general 
traits  that  makes  for  harmony  within  each 
race,  and  sharply  differentiates  the  races 
from  one  another.  Less  unlike  influences, 
exerted  for  shorter  periods  of  time,  produced 
the  groups  of  less  diverse  character  found 
within  each  of  these  races.  With  the  differ- 
ent types  of  the  White  race  thus  produced  we 

156 


AMERICA:  THE  MELTING-POT 

are  most  familiar,  and  we  know  that  within 
each  group  there  is  a  more  effective  harmony 
than  can  easily  be  developed  between  the 
groups. 

With  the  growth  and  closer  contacts  of 
peoples,  these  different  types  become  in- 
creasingly mixed.  When  the  mixture  is  of 
types  having  no  seriously  conflicting  un- 
likenesses  or  inequalities — as  in  the  case  of 
England's  basic  stocks — inheritance  values 
are  not  especially  disturbed.  They  may,  in 
favorable  combinations,  actually  reinforce  one 
another.  This  fact  is  universally  taken  ad- 
vantage of  in  developing  new  and  improved 
types  of  domestic  animals. 

But  it  is  to  the  mixtures  of  unlike  and  con- 
flicting characteristics,  the  superior  with  the 
inferior,  that  disaster  comes.  This  is  espe- 
cially true  of  the  inheritance  of  mental  char- 
acteristics in  man.  Not  only  is  there  un- 
certainty as  to  what  such  an  individual's 
inheritance  will  be;  there  is  no  certainty  that 
from  the  mixed  collection  at  his  disposal  he 
will  draw  characteristics  in  sufficient  harmony 
with  each  other  to  make  a  workable  inheri- 
tance.    This  is  the  crucial  fact  in  race  mix- 

157 


MANKIND 

ture.  We  speak  of  conflict  of  races;  there 
may  be  a  very  real  conflict  of  races,  of  types, 
within  a  single  being.  An  individual  so  con- 
stituted cannot  come  to  effective  develop- 
ment, for  he  has  not  the  unincumbered  quali- 
ties of  any  one  of  the  stocks  which  entered 
into  his  inheritance. 

It  is  for  this  reason  that  persistent  mixing 
of  unlike  human  types,  especially  of  superior 
with  inferior,  results  in  deterioration  far  be- 
yond that  due  to  a  simple  averaging  of  values. 
Truly,  our  "  Melting- Pot "  of  racial  values 
needs  vastly  more  of  skill  and  intelligence  for 
the  mixing  of  its  ingredients  than  we  have  so 
far  displayed,  if  the  brew  is  not  to  be  an  un- 
savory mess. 

We  are  often  led  away  from  an  appreciation 
of  racial  unlikenesses,  and  toward  the  view 
that  humanity  at  bottom  has  most  of  its 
attributes  in  common,  by  the  occasional  re- 
appearance in  an  inferior  stock  of  traits  im- 
planted long  before  by  some  intruder  from  a 
superior  type.  We  may  return  to  the  Ameri- 
can Indian  for  illustration  of  this.  From 
time  to  time  Indians  apparently  full-blood 
have  come  out  of  the  great  Northwest  who 

158 


AMERICA:  THE  MELTING-POT 

manifested  surprising  initiative  and  ability  in 
matters  supposed  to  be  wholly  outside  and 
beyond  the  Indian  capacity.  This  is  a  stock 
argument  of  those  who  would  set  the  Red 
man  on  a  racial  level  with  his  White  brother. 
The  shortest  answer  to  this  is  that  no  Indian 
is  sufficiently  familiar  with  his  ancestral  tree 
to  say  whether  he  is  full-blood  or  mixed.  In- 
fusions of  White  blood  began  with  the  earli- 
est Spanish  traders  of  the  Pacific  coast,  and 
have  never  ceased.  Those  who  have  read  the 
unedited  record  of  the  Lewis  and  Clarke  ex- 
pedition overland  to  the  North  Pacific,  in  the 
early  years  of  the  nineteenth  century,  will 
appreciate  the  trail  of  White  inheritance  left 
in  the  wake  of  that  intrepid  band.  Since 
their  day  hunters,  gold  seekers,  adventurers 
have  constantly  traversed  the  Indian  country 
with  the  same  incidental  result. 

Of  course  these  sporadic  infusions  would 
eventually  be  so  absorbed  into  the  great  body 
of  full  Indian  blood  as  to  be  lost  to  the  eye, 
except  for  the  lighter  complexions  of  the 
quarter  and  eighth  bloods  in  evidence  here 
and  there.  But  the  White  characteristics 
would  persist  as  White  as  ever  until  actually 

159 


MANKIND 

bred  out  of  the  race.  It  is  quite  possible, 
even  probable,  that  an  Indian,  in  physical 
aspect  a  full-blood,  would  now  and  then  have 
reached  well  back  into  his  germ-plasmic 
streams,  as  is  the  freakish  way  with  all  of  us, 
for  mental  traits  contributed  by  some  able, 
adventurous  White  ancestor.  It  is  no  dis- 
paragement of  the  Indian's  capacity  to  imi- 
tate the  White  man's  way,  to  suspect  him  of 
white  blood  if  he  sets  out  to  initiate  the  White 
man's  way. 

The  Indian  seems  to  present  no  special 
racial  problem.  We  have  used  him  here  to 
illustrate  the  significance  of  race  mixture. 
He  bids  fair  to  become  in  time  an  attenuated 
infusion  in  the  White  blood  of  the  nation — 
the  more  attenuated  the  better,  for  despite 
his  good  qualities  the  Indian  had  little  in  his 
inheritance  to  benefit  the  Aryan  stock,  and 
much  to  encumber  it.  We  are  to  be  merci- 
fully spared  at  least  one  source  of  racial  im- 
poverishment by  the  fading  away  of  the 
American  Indian. 

So  we  may  turn  with  this  much  of  relief  to 
an  examination  of  other  ingredients  in  the 
famous  "Melting- Pot." 

i6o 


CHAPTER  XV 
AMERICA:    THE  NEGRO-WHITE 

COMPLETE  RACIAL  ESTRANGEMENT  OF  WHITE  AND  BLACK 
— ^THE  TRAGEDY  OF  TWO  BEINGS  IN  ONE — STATISTICS 
ON  NEGRO  WORTHLESS — NEGRO-WHITE  CHARACTER- 
ISTICS— BLOOD  TIES  MAKE  RACES  INSEPARABLE — A 
WEIGHT  UPON  RACE  VALUES 

IN  the  Negro-White  this  country  faces  a 
race  problem  that  overshadows  every 
other  in  its  mixed  population.  The  problem 
is  not  between  full  White  and  full  Black;  the 
two  opposites  of  the  world's  peoples  have  not 
enough  in  common  on  which  to  base  a  sub- 
stantial difference.  It  concerns  the  Mulatto, 
a  being  who  is  neither  the  one  nor  the  other, 
and  yet  is  part  of  both. 

Two  more  diverse  races  were  never  called 
upon  to  remingle  their  inheritances.  We  do 
not  even  know  that  it  is  a  remingling,  for 
that  implies  racial  acquaintance  in  a  former 
age.  Yet  it  matters  little  whether  or  not 
White  and  Black  were  derived  from  a  com- 
mon ancestor;  the  period  of  their  divergence 
as  separate  races  is  so  lost  in  the  back  recesses 

i6i 


MANKIND 

of  time  that  no  claim  now  to  singleness  of 
origin  can  soften  the  fact  of  their  complete 
racial  estrangement. 

So  distinct  from  each  other  are  their  in- 
heritances that  never  in  history  have  full 
White  and  full  Black  lived  in  the  intimate 
relation  of  equality.  Yet  within  the  limits  of 
his  person  the  Negro- White  carries  the  ele- 
ments of  both  in  the  closest  association.  We 
know,  of  course,  that  these  elements  hold 
their  identity  even  in  this  strange  companion- 
ship. Black  remains  Black  and  White  is  still 
White.  We  call  him  Mulatto,  but  classify 
him  in  law  and  society  with  full-blood  Negro; 
here  we  shall  call  him  Negro- White,  to  em- 
phasize the  fact  that  in  the  fundamentals  of 
his  inheritance  he  is  truly  a  hyphenated  citi- 
zen. And  so  absurd  a  misnomer  has  the 
word  "Negro"  become  that  we  must  speak 
of  the  unmixed  African  as  Black. 

It  is  presumable  that  most  White  stock 
mingling  with  Black  is  of  the  non-assertive, 
inferior  quality  which  would  of  itself  settle 
complacently  into  any  environment,  even 
into  such  as  this;  the  average  Negro-White 
takes  as  easily  the  conditions  within  his  soul 

162 


AMERICA:  THE  NEGRO-WHITE 

as  the  Inferior  White  takes  the  conditions  in 
his  neighborhood.  But  we  know  that  in  the 
days  of  slavery  much  of  the  best  Southern 
white  blood  found  its  way  into  colored  veins. 
Those  dominating,  assertive  traits  still  wan- 
der unchanged  through  the  germ-plasmic 
streams  of  many  an  humble  colored  folk. 
What  a  chaos  of  emotions,  then,  must  there 
be  in  the  soul  of  him  whose  sadly  mixed  in- 
heritance happens  to  include  some  of  these 
passion-sown  jewels  of  the  White  man !  Is 
there  a  more  excruciating  intimacy  than  that 
of  dominantly  White,  bred  through  unnum- 
bered generations  to  association  with  the  best 
of  Aryan,  fettered  within  the  limits  of  a  soul 
to  a  company  of  uncomprehending  Black  ? 

The  Negro-White  thus  afflicted  is  a  living 
protest.  His  is  not  the  protest  of  a  Negro — 
no  Negro  protests  his  race.  It  is  the  cry  of  a 
forceful  Aryan  in  soul-entanglement  with  an 
utterly  strange  being.  How  little  do  we 
comprehend  the  character  arrangement  of 
this  racially  perplexed  individual !  He  does 
not  even  comprehend  himself.  When,  with 
quivering  voice  and  muscles  tense,  he  de- 
claims against  the  injustices  done  "his  race," 

163 


MANKIND 

he  falls  into  the  common  error  that  "his  race" 
is  the  Negro.  He,  too,  yields  to  general 
opinion  and  the  law  that  a  single  line,  drawn 
close  up  to  full  White  and  farthest  away  from 
full  Black,  divides  the  two  races. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  a  line  between  Negro 
and  White  would  have  to  thread  its  way 
through  every  cell  in  the  Negro-White's 
body.  Classification  of  him  with  either  race 
is  absurd,  no  matter  at  what  degree  of  color 
the  line  is  drawn.  The  Negro- White  belongs 
to  neither  race.  He  has  the  unchanged 
qualities  of  both. 

We  little  realize  into  what  error  this  classi- 
fication of  the  Negro-White  leads  us.  His 
thousand  acts  of  initiative  in  conforming  to 
the  Aryan  way  are  impelled  by  his  White 
characteristics,  yet  so  accustomed  are  we  to 
regard  as  Negro  every  person  with  a  trace  of 
colored  blood  that  we  set  down  these  acts  to 
the  credit  of  the  Negro.  Most  of  the  litera- 
ture and  all  the  statistics  covering  Negro  ac- 
complishments are  worthless,  since  they  deal 
mainly  with  doings  of  White  men  incum- 
bered with  Black  inheritances.  There  is  no 
initiative  in  the  full-blood  Negro  to  follow 

164 


AMERICA:  THE  NEGRO-WHITE 

the  White  man's  way,  however  well  he  may 
be  taught  to  do  so. 

This  last  statement  will  be  vigorously  pro- 
tested with  an  array  of  "Negroes"  who  have 
demonstrated  a  White  man's  capacity.  But 
as  with  the  Indian,  no  Negro  in  America  can 
say  with  any  certainty  that  he  is  full-blood 
African.  Continued  infusions  of  Black  into 
a  once  mixed  line  may  so  reduce  the  propor- 
tion of  its  White  characteristics  as  to  obscure 
them  from  the  eye,  but  so  long  as  any  remain 
they  are  identical  with  their  predecessors  that 
first  strayed  over  from  the  Aryan,  and  still 
effective  for  determining  character,  although 
of  less  net  effect  because  of  their  load  of 
Black.  Now  when  a  "Negro"  attains  to  more 
than  an  imitative  success  in  those  matters 
which  pertain  exclusively  to  the  White  man, 
and  through  the  ages  were  beyond  the  at- 
tainment of  the  African,  it  is  a  sensible  con- 
clusion that  he  is  dominated  by  his  White 
characteristics.  Booker  Washington  is  said 
to  have  had  a  remarkably  able  White  father. 
Surely  no  one  who  has  watched  his  great  edu- 
cational work  would  say  that  the  Black  in- 
heritance of  Booker  Washington  was  thus 

165 


MANKIND 

demonstrating  Itself.  And  very  few  colored 
people  who  manifest  White  initiative  claim  or 
appear  to  be  full  Black. 

It  is  just  this  entanglement  In  the  flesh  of 
White  and  Black  that  makes  the  hopelessness 
of  any  solution  for  the  Negro- White  problem. 
Nature  Is  wise  In  decreeing  sterility  for  the 
offspring  of  racially  discordant  matlngs.  The 
offense  against  her  cannot  become  self-per- 
petuating. She  would  have  been  more  than 
kind  had  she  put  a  like  ban  upon  the  evil 
matlngs  of  White  and  Black,  for  that  would 
have  left  the  races  virtually  full  White  and 
full  Black,  with  their  common  desire  to  live 
each  after  Its  own  fashion.  Then  there  could 
have  been  no  race  problem.  With  the  fall  of 
slavery  the  separation  would  have  been  easily 
effected,  and  the  integrity  of  the  White  race 
maintained. 

But  nature  decrees  that  the  Aryan  shall 
pay  dearly  for  his  forcible  crossings  with  in- 
ferior peoples.  That  decree  Is  written  upon 
the  vanishing  ruins  of  every  dead  civilization. 
And  so  now  In  America,  a  tenth  of  our  popu- 
lation is  of  Negro  blood  In  some  degree, 
grafted  upon  us  by  the  unbreakable  ties  of 

i66 


AMERICA:  THE   NEGRO-WHITE 

blood  infusion.  Why  talk  of  deporting  to 
their  African  home  a  people  whom  no  one 
can  separate  into  White  and  Black  ?  Why- 
talk  of  the  Negro-White  as  either  Negro  or 
White  ? 

So  to  the  ever-increasing  proportion  of  our 
own  inferior  stocks  we  must  add  in  one  lump 
this  depreciated  mixture  of  ten  millions,  to 
hasten  the  day  when  the  critical  dispropor- 
tion of  our  ineffectives  shall  have  been  at- 
tained, and  we,  too,  go  the  way  of  all  others. 


167 


CHAPTER  XVI 
AMERICA:  THE  LABOR   IMMIGRANT 

EFFECT  ON  RACE  VALUES — RACIAL  REQUIREMENTS — A 
MEASURE  OF  RACE  VALUE — SOUTHERN  ITALIANS — 
HISTORIC  MIGRATORS  AND  LABOR  IMMIGRANTS — OUR 
IMMIGRATION  LAWS — AMERICA'S  RUSH  TO  DEVELOP- 
MENT 

THE  unthinking  altruism  of  a  generation 
or  more  ago  that  viewed  this  country 
as  a  free  haven  for  the  oppressed,  disgruntled, 
and  unwanted  of  all  nations  is  gradually 
yielding  to  the  instinct  of  national  self-preser- 
vation. This  instinct,  in  its  unintelligence, 
leads  naturally  to  the  social  rather  than  to 
the  racial  view.  A  very  considerable  number 
of  disabilities  is  now  listed  in  our  immigration 
regulations  for  excluding  undesirable  aliens, 
mainly  because  we  are  beginning  to  compre- 
hend the  tremendous  social  distortions  which 
result  from  the  injection  of  immigrant  masses 
faster  than  they  can  be  assimilated.  In  the 
literature  on  immigration  there  is  little  appre- 
ciation of  its  racial  significance.     But  it  is  the 

1 68 


AMERICA:  THE  LABOR   IMMIGRANT 

realization  that  every  foreigner  imported  to 
dig  our  ditches  is  also  a  potential  father  of 
our  population  that  concerns  us  at  this  mo- 
ment. His  uncertain  social  qualities  as  an 
ignorant  ditch  digger  are  of  infinitely  less  sig- 
nificance than  his  qualities  as  a  race  builder. 
We  may  profitably  turn  from  the  much-dis- 
cussed social  aspect  of  immigration  to  study 
its  effect  on  racial  values. 

First,  let  us  make  use  of  our  new  knowledge 
to  ascertain  what  the  maintenance  of  our 
present  racial  values  requires  of  us,  and  then 
see  how  well  the  quality  of  the  incoming  alien 
squares  up  with  the  requirements. 

If  we  have  learned  anything  from  this 
study  it  is  that  a  civilization  lives  only  so 
long  as  it  is  able  to  develop  from  its  available 
sources  a  fair  proportion  of  exceptional  indi- 
viduals whose  function  it  is  to  leaven  the 
human  lump.  We  also  know  that  civiliza- 
tion has  the  disastrous  habit  of  dissipating 
these  best  values,  and  in  its  present  go-lucky 
method  of  propagation  is  helplessly  depen- 
dent for  its  existence  upon  fast-diminishing 
sources  of  supply.  These  essentials  of  race  are 
as  vital  to  us  in  the  United  States  as  they  were 

169 


MANKIND 

to  every  civilization  that  eventually  died  for 
lack  of  them. 

The  imperative  requirement,  then,  from  any 
influx  of  human  stock  is  that  it  shall  be  com- 
petent to  replenish  the  hereditary  values  which 
in  the  ordinary  course  are  being  drained  out 
of  our  native  population.  It  is  not  enough 
that  it  shall  be  capable  of  reproducing  a  dead 
level  of  worthy  mediocrity;  we  ourselves  are 
multiplying  that  grade  of  individual  in  more 
than  sufficient  numbers  for  our  racial  good. 
We  want  new  possibilities  injected  into  the 
source  from  which  our  leaders  must  come. 
The  new  stocks  should  be  capable  of  sending 
their  fair  share  to  the  pinnacles  of  our  civili- 
zation. And  the  very  least  that  we  should 
require  of  all  immigration  is  that  it  brings  to 
us  genetic  values  in  as  good  proportion  as 
they  exist  in  our  native  population.  If  they 
bring  us  any  less,  they  bring  us  racial  depre- 
ciation. 

How  are  these  genetic  values  to  be  recog- 
nized }  Certainly  not  by  the  state  of  develop- 
ment to  which  the  individual  immigrant  has 
attained.  Environment  may  have  held  him 
from  an  effective  disclosure  of  his  capacity. 

170 


AMERICA:  THE  LABOR  IMMIGRANT 

But  in  this  age  of  world-wide  opportunity  for 
ability  to  demonstrate  itself,  there  is  a  criterion 
for  making  a  fair  estimate  of  the  racial  possi- 
bilities of  a  given  people  taken  as  a  whole: 

If  our  immigrants  come  from  countries 
which  are  themselves  in  process  of  growth 
through  the  upward  migration  of  exceptional 
individuals  from  their  masses,  we  may  rea- 
sonably expect  that  the  stocks  which  are  com- 
ing to  us  from  those  same  masses  contain  po- 
tential capacities  which  will  add  to  our  racial 
values. 

But  if  these  immigrants  come  from  coun- 
tries or  communities  which  have  long  since 
been  denied  a  vigorous  growth  by  reason  of 
having  drained  their  masses  of  their  best 
material,  it  is  safe  to  assume  that  those  masses 
have  reached  a  condition  of  breeding  true  to 
a  mediocrity  which  will  continue  under  any 
and  all  conditions.  The  importation  of  stocks 
from  those  communities  will  merely  add  to 
the  growing  inability  of  our  own  masses  to 
produce  the  superior  stocks  which  alone  make 
a  civilization  possible. 

A  proposition  of  this  kind  has  to  meet  the 
absurd  notion  that,  somehow,  the  free  oppor- 

171 


MANKIND 

tunities  and  high  ideals  of  this  country  will 
develop  to  American  standards  any  sort  of 
material  that  happens  to  come  to  us.  But 
the  best  that  our  institutions  can  do  is  to 
develop  stocks  which  have  capacity  for  de- 
velopment; if  the  stufif  is  not  in  them,  and  has 
been  demonstrated  in  their  own  country  to 
have  been  absent  from  their  germ-plasm  for 
generations,  nothing  under  heaven  that  we 
can  do  will  put  genetic  value  into  them  or 
into  their  offspring.  Their  children  and  their 
children's  children  will  not  have  those  char- 
acteristics which  are  essential  to  creative  lead- 
ership, and  will  simply  add  to  the  depreciated 
human  material  which  we  already  have.  No 
amount  of  education  or  environmental  work 
of  any  sort  can  push  that  stock  beyond  the 
limit  of  its  narrow  capacity. 

With  these  basic  principles  in  view,  let  us 
take  a  look  at  the  various  immigrations  of 
laboring  classes  to  this  country. 

Until  a  generation  ago  by  far  the  greater 
proportion  of  our  labor  immigrants  came 
from  the  north  of  Europe.  These  immigrants 
on  arrival  did  not  present  any  more  favorable 
personal  appearance  than  do  the  immigrants 

172 


AMERICA:  THE  LABOR  IMMIGRANT 

whom  we  are  now  receiving  from  southern 
Italy,  the  Baltic  regions,  and  the  Levant. 
But  the  Germans  and  Scandinavians — taking 
as  examples  two  of  our  most  worthy  immi- 
grant stocks — came  from  countries  which 
were  themselves  in  full  vigor  and  have  since 
continued  developing  at  a  rate  commensurate 
with  other  civilized  nations.  The  very  fact 
of  their  increasing  development  indicates  with 
certainty  the  genetic  value  of  their  stocks, 
and  this  value  has  been  amply  ^demonstrated 
in  the  development  here  of  the  immigrants 
from  these  countries.  Under  our  greater  op- 
portunities they  have  given  us  the  benefit  of 
hereditary  values  which  at  home  have  made 
their  countries  to  prosper. 

But  immigration  from  the  countries  of 
northern  Europe  has  very  largely  ceased.  In 
its  place  we  are  receiving  in  increasing  num- 
bers each  year,  to  the  extent  of  a  million  or 
more,  immigrants  from  southern  Italy  and 
from  numerous  other  countries  adjacent  to 
the  Mediterranean.  Not  one  of  these  coun- 
tries is  in  a  condition  of  healthy  internal 
growth.  As  a  fair  example  of  all  of  them,  we 
will  consider  southern  Italy. 

173 


MANKIND 

The  populations  of  southern  and  northern 
Italy  differ  so  widely  that  they  can  scarcely  be 
thought  of  as  one  people.  They  scarcely  re- 
gard each  other  as  one  people.  So  superior 
are  the  people  of  northern  Italy  that  it  is  safe 
to  say  that  the  existence  to-day  of  Italy  as  a 
whole  is  due  to  the  strength  of  its  northern 
population.  Southern  Italy  as  a  people  by 
itself  would  hardly  hold  a  place  on  the  map 
of  Europe. 

Southern  Italy  is  in  the  condition  of  having 
been  drained  of  its  superior  blood  for  hun- 
dreds of  years.  It  has  long  since  ceased  to 
produce  exceptional  individuals  in  any  sig- 
nificant number.  Potential  leaders  do  not 
need  to  emigrate  from  a  country  where  ability 
is  the  scarcest  characteristic.  The  mass  from 
which  we  draw  Italians  has  so  thoroughly 
parted  with  its  superior  stocks  that  for  gen- 
erations it  has  been  breeding  almost  as  true 
to  type  as  rabbits  breed,  and  with  as  little 
hope  of  developing  unusual  individuals. 

This  condition  is  equally  true  for  the  forty- 
odd  types  which  are  now  coming  to  us  from 
non-progressive  communities.  Indeed,  many 
of  them  never  were  possessed  of  particularly 

174 


AMERICA:  THE  LABOR   IMMIGRANT 

worthy  inheritances;  their  peoples  have  never 
seen  racial  heights  which  at  any  time  would 
have  justified  the  minghng  of  their  inheri- 
tances with  the  progressive  Aryan. 

Anti-restrictionists  assume  to  compare  fa- 
vorably our  labor  immigration  with  the  his- 
toric migrations  which  have  produced  every 
great  civilization,  including  our  own.  No 
more  futile  argument  could  be  attempted.  In- 
itiative, daring,  exceptional  inheritance  striv- 
ing to  express  itself  in  new  undertakings,  con- 
science that  would  not  be  suppressed — these 
were  among  the  qualities  which  selected  the 
migrators  of  history  for  the  building  of  civili- 
zations. Present-day  immigrants,  more  often 
than  not,  are  selected  by  steamship  agents  for 
their  fitness  to  get  by  the  immigration  inspec- 
tors, and  they  come  to  attach  themselves  to 
a  social  order  already  established.  Not  one 
of  the  qualities  which  stirred  the  historic  mi- 
grator to  action  is  essential  to  so  mild  an  ad- 
venture. Such  selection  as  we  have  is  mostly 
selection  from  a  poor  discard. 

Equipped  as  we  are  with  knowledge  of  ra- 
cial significances,  it  should  be  apparent  with- 
out argument  that  continued  importation  of 

i7B 


MANKIND 

these  Inferior  genetic  values,  added  to  our  own 
increasing  product,  would  some  day  bring 
us  to  the  critical  disproportion  between  non- 
progressive and  sustaining  stocks  which  de- 
termines always  the  life  of  a  civilization. 

The  vagueness  of  our  notion  as  to  what 
really  constitutes  racial  value  is  displayed  in 
our  immigration  laws.  They  are  designed 
solely  to  exclude  physically  and  mentally  un- 
sound stocks,  and  certain  persons  of  color. 
Beyond  that,  "A  man's  a  man,"  in  the  eyes 
of  Uncle  Sam.  The  world's  age-long  story  of 
what  happens  to  depreciated  mixtures  of  peo- 
ples has  not  penetrated  under  that  old  beaver 
tile.  So  between  the  money  lust  of  foreign 
steamship  companies  and  the  eager  desire  of 
our  huge  industries  for  manual  laborers  of  a 
type  that  will  "stay  put"  industrially,  we 
are  loading  up  with  racial  material  that  is 
also  going  to  "stay  put"  in  every  other  re- 
spect, in  spite  of  our  million  endeavors  to 
make  something  more  than  imitative  stuff 
out  of  it. 

Here,  again,  protest  will  be  entered.  Do 
not  exceptional  individuals  arise  now  and 
then  from  these  apparently  hopeless  sources  ? 

176 


AMERICA:  THE  LABOR   IMMIGRANT 

They  do.  But  they  arise  so  infrequently  that 
they  prove  only  the  general  barrenness  of 
their  hereditary  values.  We  should  hold  to 
a  view  of  proportion  in  our  estimates  of  these 
people.  One  Mary  Antin  does  not  compen- 
sate for  the  tens  of  thousands  of  Russian  Jews 
who  never  get  beyond  a  driving  acuteness  in 
small  trade,  and  range  down  from  that  to 
gunmen  for  wages  and  incendiaries  for  insur- 
ance. 

What  if  our  immigration  laws  should  suc- 
ceed perfectly  in  excluding  the  physically  and 
mentally  unsound  ^  The  complete  attainment 
of  their  purpose  would  bring  us  only  to  the 
threshold  of  race  protection.  In  physical  and 
mental  soundness  there  is  no  indication  of  the 
qualities  which  we  must  have  if  we  are  not 
to  be  overtaken  by  the  dead  level  of  medioc- 
rity that  already  claims  nine-tenths  of  the 
world's  peoples. 

What  are  we  going  to  do  about  it  ?  It  is 
difficult  to  reshape  laws  which  have  no  basis 
in  the  fundamental  needs  of  the  situation.  If 
we  are  to  sustain  the  quality  of  our  heritage 
and  give  permanency  to  the  advantage  we 
now  have  in  the  world's  affairs,  we  must  begin 

177 


MANKIND 

afresh  with  the  conception  that  every  drop  of 
imported  blood  containing  less  of  promise 
than  our  native  blood  lowers  our  capacity  to 
resist  degeneration.  A  standard  set  upon 
this  basis  would  indeed  be  beyond  the  dreams 
of  the  most  ardent  restrictionist,  and  far  be- 
yond present  attainment.  But  this  study  is 
dealing  with  facts,  not  compromising  with 
expediency,  and  any  lower  standard  will  de- 
preciate our  racial  values  with  arithmetical 
certainty. 

It  is  not  the  purpose  to  argue  for  a  compre- 
hensive scheme  to  protect  our  inheritances 
against  depreciation  by  immigrant  stocks. 
Our  commercial  habit  of  fifty  years  past  is 
against  the  practicability  of  any  scheme  that 
approaches  adequacy.  But  why  do  we  force 
to  abnormal  proportions  the  development  of 
our  resources  by  importing  hordes  of  inferior 
peoples,  only  to  have  them  plague  the  life  out 
of  us  when  lessening  raw  material  shall  have 
returned  us  to  more  normal  conditions  .?  Is  it 
because  we  have  no  vision  of  that  compara- 
tively near  future .?  Then  what  of  a  thou- 
sand years  hence,  or  ten  thousand  .?  Time  is 
coming  upon  the  human  race  with  centuries 

178 


AMERICA:  THE  LABOR   IMMIGRANT 

Still  unnumbered,  whether  we  reckon  with 
them  or  not.  No  other  undeveloped  lands 
invite  us  to  rush  our  present  task  to  comple- 
tion. Why  load  the  business  of  a  century 
upon  the  shoulders  of  each  generation,  when 
the  centuries  are  without  end,  and  the  earth's 
resources  are  limited .? 

Suggestions  of  this  sort  are  not  in  tune 
with  the  kind  of  Americanism  that  worships 
bigness  of  achievement  and  fancies  itself  par- 
ticularly circumspect  if  it  looks  ahead  more 
than  a  generation.  The  movement  for  con- 
servation accomplished  chiefly  the  saving  of 
lumber  forests,  for  that  was  the  failure  near- 
est impending.  But  forests  can  be  grown 
again.  The  prospective  exhaustion  within  a 
few  generations  of  irreplaceable  ore,  coal,  and 
oil  deposits  seems  to  carry  no  special  appeal. 
Then  why  should  Americans  be  expected  to 
worry  over  the  prospect  of  racial  failure .? 

It  is  an  idle  boast  that  in  forty  years  we 
have  seen  more  of  material  progress  than 
Egypt  saw  in  her  four  thousand.  The  point 
is  that  Egypt  saw  four  thousand  years.  In 
this  there  is  a  permanence  that  has  no  relation 
to   our   high-speed   development.     With    us, 

179 


]\  ANKIND 

progress  and  permj  nence  do  not  seem  to  have 
reached  a  working  agreement.  There  is  as 
much  suggestion  of  continuity  in  our  attitude 
as  in  that  of  an  aeroplanist  pointing  upward 
at  an  angle  of  forty  degrees.  The  difference 
is  that  the  aeroplanist's  attitude  is  a  mere 
preHminary  to  a  definite  plan;  he  is  not  leav- 
ing it  to  some  catastrophe  ahead  to  show  him 
a  new  course. 

The  powers  that  control  the  material  affairs 
of  this  country  seem  to  have  left  the  contem- 
plation of  these  things  to  those  who  can  do 
no  more  than  give  out  futile  warnings.  Mean- 
while, vision  of  the  future  is  shortened  by  the 
brilliancy  of  the  present,  and  deliberate  living 
is  becoming  a  lost  art.  So  there  is  left  the 
conclusion  that  to  our  other  sources  of  racial 
impoverishment  we  must  add,  and  by  all  the 
signs  must  continue  to  add,  masses  of  hu- 
manity from  the  racial  wastage  of  Europe. 
By  that  much  more  we  dim  the  prospects  of 
the  English-speaking  Aryan  in  the  civiliza- 
tion of  the  future. 


1 80 


CHAPTER  XVII 
ENGLISH,  OR  GERMAN? 

ONE  OR  THE  OTHER  MUST  BECOME  DOMINANT — RACIAL 
PROSPECTS  OF  ENGLISH-SPEAKING  PEOPLES — THE 
UNITED    STATES,    CANADA,   AUSTRALIA,    NEW   ZEALAND 

OUR    PARTICIPATION     IN    THE    WAR — ^THE    MONROE 

DOCTRINE — ^THE    UNCERTAIN    FUTURE 

IF  differences  of  inherited  characteristics  are 
to  continue  to  hold  German  and  EngHsh- 
speaking  peoples  to  separate  ambitions  and 
ideals,  it  is  in  the  nature  of  things  that  in  the 
course  of  time  one  or  the  other  shall  become 
racially  dominant  and  give  the  color  of  its 
interpretations  to  the  culture  of  a  receptive 
world.  In  view  of  unlikenesses  in  these  inter- 
pretations, especially  with  respect  to  the  rela- 
tion of  the  individual  to  the  state  and  of 
states  to  each  other,  it  is  of  vital  concern  to 
the  civilization  of  the  future  which  of  these 
two  shall  come  to  dominance.  Unless  am.ong 
the  significant  reversals  of  the  age  there  occurs 
one  in  human  nature  itself,  the  ideals  to  be 
impressed  in  a  not  distant  future  upon  the 
earth's  impressionable  multitudes  will  not  be 
English  and  German,  but  English  or  German. 

i8i 


MANKIND 

The  decision,  if  it  must  come,  will  even- 
tually rest  upon  survival  of  racial  values. 
What,  then,  are  the  comparative  racial  pros- 
pects of  Germany  and  the  various  English- 
speaking  peoples  ? 

One  outstanding  difference  is  that  Ger- 
many, self-contained,  fully  populated,  will 
continue  to  hold  an  advantage  she  has  held 
from  the  beginning,  in  being  able  to  maintain 
the  integrity  and  purity  of  her  stocks  against 
deteriorating  mixtures.  Without  exception, 
the  younger  English-speaking  peoples — and 
even  England  herself — have  sought  in  varying 
degree  the  temporary  advantage  that  comes 
from  importing  inferior  stocks  to  do  their  less 
pleasant  tasks. 

Let  us  consider  first  our  own  racial  pros- 
pect. In  the  three  preceding  chapters  we 
have  studied  the  results  in  the  United  States 
of  this  commercially  profitable  but  racially 
suicidal  mingling  of  unlike  peoples.  The 
African  infusion,  and  the  past,  present,  and 
future  importations  from  non-progressive  for- 
eign stocks,  together  constitute  what  might 
be  called  an  extraneous  load  upon  our  racial 
values.     It  is  significant  that  a  similar  load 

182 


ENGLISH,  OR  GERMAN  ? 

of  anything  like  its  proportions  does  not  rest 
upon  any  other  Enghsh-speaking  peoples, 
except,  perhaps,  South  Africa.  This  seems 
to  be  a  special  handicap  put  upon  the  United 
States  of  America.  Although  disproportion- 
ate increase  of  superior  and  inferior  stocks  re- 
mains the  chief  factor  in  racial  depreciation 
among  all  civilized  peoples,  our  own  special 
handicap  is  not  to  be  passed  over  lightly.  The 
tendency  of  twenty  or  more  distinct  peoples 
to  maintain  a  relative  separateness  of  ideals, 
while  living  as  neighbors  and  outwardly  sub- 
scribing to  American  citizenship,  is  only  a  few 
degrees  less  threatening  than  would  be  a  free 
intermixture  of  all  their  inheritances.  A  long 
and  persistent  intermixture  would  tend  to 
develop  social  unity  in  the  much-heralded 
"true  American"  of  the  Melting- Pot,  but  may 
Heaven  preserve  us  from  a  unity  that  comes 
with  the  passive  worthlessness  of  a  downward- 
bred  mongrel  type.  We  can  better  afford  racial 
separateness,  with  all  its  menace  to  social 
peace. 

Yet  these  rigid  alternatives  hold  us  to  a 
most  perplexing  condition  of  suspended  effec- 
tiveness; a  workable  social  understanding  can- 

183 


MANKIND 

not  be  forced  against  the  persistent  separate- 
ness  of  so  many  peoples,  while  a  decent  re- 
gard for  the  future  of  the  race  should  turn  us 
from  the  dull  harmony  of  mongrellsm.  There 
seems  to  be  no  way  out;  but  that  very  fact 
should  restrain  us  from  getting  any  farther  in. 
In  the  light  of  present  knowledge,  further 
loading  up  with  inferior  stocks  would  be  de- 
liberate race  suicide. 

Whatever  we  may  do  to  check  further  dis- 
astrous type  mixtures,  our  disadvantageous 
start  in  this  matter  is  bound  to  affect  our  fu- 
ture position  with  respect  to  both  Germany 
and  the  English-speaking  peoples.  Yet  against 
these  racially  and  socially  disquieting  influ- 
ences, the  United  States  still  has  Aryan 
values  as  effective  as  those  of  any  inheritor 
of  England's  widely  distributed  legacy.  Those 
early  stocks  were  of  the  sort  of  genetic  mate- 
rial to  build  a  great  Republic.  What  if  they 
did  not  foresee  our  careless  invitation  to  peo- 
ples who  could  never  respond  harmoniously 
to  their  lofty  ideal  of  culture  .?  They  thought 
that  this  was  to  be  a  land  for  their  children's 
children,  and  they  did  their  best  to  carry  out 
the  idea  by  following  the  Biblical  injunction 

184 


ENGLISH,  OR  GERMAN  ? 

to  people  the  earth.  They  were  prolific;  their 
increase  overflowed  westward  again  and  again, 
as  far  as  the  Pacific  coast,  and  their  descen- 
dants in  turn,  effectively  mingled  with  the 
sturdy  product  of  the  earlier  migrations  from 
northern  Europe,  have  endowed  this  country 
with  a  fund  of  genetic  values  that  needs  only 
to  be  maintained — even  in  its  present  propor- 
tion— to  insure  permanence  to  the  most  for- 
tunately situated  people  on  earth.  But  to 
hold  these  values  to  their  present  proportion 
is  the  most  difficult  order  ever  put  up  to  the 
American  people. 

Of  the  other  English-speaking  countries, 
Canada  is  a  land  of  material  opportunities 
comparable  in  many  respects  with  our  own. 
Racially  she  has  the  advantage  of  us  in  the 
purity  of  her  British-descended  stocks,  and  in 
the  prospect  of  continuing  that  purity  if  she 
has  the  wisdom  to  choose  to  do  so.  The 
cloud  on  her  racial  horizon  is  her  legacy  of 
original  French  stocks,  which  persist  in  re- 
maining at  a  genetic  and  cultural  level  below 
that  of  the  dominant  English-speaking  popu- 
lation. They  may  fill  a  worthy  place  in  Can- 
ada's economic  scheme,  but  they  do  not  fur- 

i8s 


MANKIND 

nish  their  proportion  to  the  essential  abiHty 
of  Canada's  people,  and  to  that  extent  are  a 
hinderance  to  her  racial  future. 

But  in  Canada,  as  with  us,  the  Star  of  Em- 
pire has  moved  westward;  and  in  that  great 
West  is  the  purest  and  best  of  her  Aryan  in- 
heritances, needing,  as  ours,  only  to  be  per- 
petuated to  make  of  Canada  one  of  the  great 
peoples  of  the  world. 

The  racial  difficulties  of  South  Africa  do 
not  augur  well  for  her  place  among  the  Eng- 
lish-speaking communities  of  the  future.  Her 
dominant  people  have  displayed  an  admirable 
comprehension  of  race  values  in  attempting 
to  stay  the  almost  overwhelming  flood  of  in- 
ferior stocks,  but  the  odds  against  them  are 
so  immense  that  nothing  short  of  revolution- 
ary tactics  will  save  South  Africa  for  a  great 
Aryan  future. 

The  pure  White  of  India  is  an  exotic,  and 
can  never  be  anything  else.  Neither  India 
nor  any  other  tropical  country  has  an  Aryan 
future.  The  beautifully  mystical  culture  of 
India  is  essentially  non-Aryan,  and  is  not 
under  discussion. 

In  Australia  and  New  Zealand  we  come 
i86 


ENGLISH,  OR  GERMAN  ? 

again  to  lands  brilliant  in  promise  of  a  great 
future  for  the  English-speaking  Aryan.  Both 
have  their  race  problems,  and  both  are  meeting 
them  with  conspicuous  intelligence.  Coun- 
tries of  dimensions  so  magnificent,  with  re- 
sources scarcely  touched  and  peopled  by  Brit- 
ish stocks  still  in  the  full  vigor  of  youth,  have 
only  to  conserve  the  one  and  adequately  per- 
petuate the  other  to  make  sure  of  a  future 
well  out  into  the  unknown  that  lies  ahead  of 
us  all. 

The  United  States,  Canada,  Australia,  New 
Zealand — four  young  giants  of  the  earth, 
growing  and  with  abundant  resources  for  fur- 
ther growth.  Were  these  four,  with  England 
as  their  mutual  bond,  joined  in  singleness  of 
purpose  to  carry  forward  to  still  greater 
achievement  the  humane  culture  that  distin- 
guishes the  English-speaking  Aryan,  who 
could  effectually  set  up  against  them  ?  Ger- 
many has  youth,  but  it  is  the  youth  that  com- 
pares well  with  the  old  age  about  her,  not 
with  these  four  lusty  sons  of  Great  Britain. 
Germany  may  more  easily  preserve  the  purity 
and  strength  of  her  inheritance  within  her 

187 


MANKIND 

realm,  but  her  realm  is  full  and  her  overflow 
must  go  out  to  an  inevitable  mingling  with 
other  peoples,  unless  by  sheer  force  she  gains 
foothold  on  forbidden  ground.  Any  one  of 
these  four  English  peoples  has  undeveloped 
resources  greater  than  the  resources  of  all 
Germany.  But  resources  alone  determine 
nothing  in  human  affairs;  they  are  the  instru- 
ments of  resourceful  peoples.  What  is  more 
clear,  then,  than  that  English-speaking  peo- 
ples, with  their  superior  opportunities,  have 
only  to  perpetuate  their  genetic  values  in 
order  to  make  sure  of  a  predominating  in- 
fluence in  the  future  civilization  .? 

One  of  the  most  profoundly  stirring  episodes 
of  this  war  has  been  the  coming  of  England's 
sons  from  every  quarter  of  the  globe  to  re- 
vitalize the  land  that  gave  them  life;  not  only 
her  sons,  but  her  subject  peoples  from  every 
dominion  have  flocked  to  the  English  stand- 
ard, for  there  was  full  recognition  that  the 
war  is  to  decide  between  a  further-reaching 
Prussianism,  and  the  world  culture  of  which 
Great  Britain  is  the  chief  exponent.  And 
conspicuous  among  these  who  have  given  of 
their  best  blood  that  this  world  culture  may 


ENGLISH,  OR   GERMAN  ? 

endure  unaffllcted  with  Prussianism  are  Can- 
ada, Australia,  and  New  Zealand — three  of 
the  four  greatest  descendants  of  Great  Brit- 
ain. Then  the  United  States,  after  fevered 
years  and  months  of  assisting  in  eminently 
proper  and  neutral  ways,  came  out  squarely 
for  her  natural  allies. 

As  a  nation  not  bound  to  England  by  politi- 
cal ties,  the  war  was,  diplomatically,  no  affair 
of  ours.  But  in  stressful  times  like  these,  the 
age-old  ties  of  race  raise  their  appeal  above 
the  dictum  of  governments.  The  require- 
ments of  political  neutrality  were  holding 
us  to  an  attitude  as  unracial,  as  artificial 
with  respect  to  our  deepest  emotions,  as 
ever  a  strong  people  assumed  toward  their 
own  kind  in  time  of  need.  By  entering  this 
war  we  not  only  did  the  obvious  thing  in 
the  present  crisis,  but  we  also  set  ourselves 
right  with  a  far  more  enduring  situation; 
if  we  had  not  put  effective  meaning  into  the 
blood  relationship  while  the  war  was  on, 
that  relationship  would  have  been  thinner 
than  water  for  years  afterward.  The  hope 
of  the  English-speaking  peoples  is  in  unity; 
a   cultural   union   to   last   through   the   cen- 

189 


MANKIND 

turies,  but  also  temporary  unions  of  force 
whenever  force  threatens  their  cultural  ideals. 
Those  differences  in  racial  character  which 
outlive  wars  and  their  futile  settlements  de- 
mand that  nothing  be  left  undone  which 
will  lead  to  a  more  workable  understanding 
among  Britain's  descendants.  At  this  late 
day,  however  much  we  may  do,  we  cannot 
match  the  frightful  sacrifices  already  made 
by  the  Allies.  But  In  their  broken  condition 
after  the  war  we  shall  have  opportunity  to 
use  our  vast  resources  for  their  upbuilding 
— not  as  a  favor,  but  as  a  deferred  obliga- 
tion. And  if  we  let  commercial  selfishness 
turn  us  from  this  demonstration  of  brother- 
hood, we  would  not  deserve  the  respect  of 
English,  or  French,  or  of  any  other  people 
that  has  done  its  full  part  from  the  beginning 
of  the  war.  -, 

The  time  may  come,  too,  when  we  ourselves 
shall  need  the  active  backing  of  our  English- 
speaking  cousins,  if  we  persist  in  maintaining 
a  situation  so  unracial  as  that  imposed  by  the 
Monroe  Doctrine.  The  masses  in  the  Cen- 
tral and  South  American  Republics  are  for 

190 


ENGLISH,  OR  GERMAN  ? 

the  most  part  mixtures  of  decadent  Spanish 
with  Negro  and  native  Indian  stocks.  In 
certain  locaHties,  where  intermixture  has  been 
going  on  for  several  centuries,  it  has  evolved 
a  fairly  homogeneous  type  of  depreciated  hu- 
man, who  may  indeed  be  hailed  as  the  "true 
American"  of  the  Melting-Pot.  He  is  a  few 
degrees  lower,  perhaps,  than  we  in  the  United 
States  could  evolve  in  a  like  number  of  cen- 
turies of  promiscuous  breeding,  but  the  low- 
class  Spanish-American  type  is  a  faithful  illus- 
tration of  the  ineffectiveness  that  comes  from 
persistent  mingling  of  unlike  inheritances. 

The  saving  fact  for  these  so-called  Repub- 
lics is  that  they  all  have  a  smattering  of  fairly 
capable  leaders,  mostly  of  Spanish  blood, 
whose  chief  aim  seems  to  be  to  impose  them- 
selves upon,  rather  than  leaven,  the  always 
excessive  and  sometimes  overwhelming  masses 
of  the  inferior.  Consequently,  these  govern- 
ments, with  a  few  exceptions,  alternate  more 
or  less  frequently  between  the  anarchy  of 
bandit  leaders  and  a  despotism  so  uncertain 
of  its  tenure  that  it  must  turn  the  opportunity 
of  office  to  quick  profit.  And  knowledge  of 
race  tells  us  that   all  talk  of  such  peoples 

191 


MANKIND 

emerging  some  day  into  higher  levels  is  mer- 
est cant. 

This  is  not  a  discussion  of  the  Monroe  Doc- 
trine. It  may  be  expedient  for  us  to  insist 
that  we  shall  tolerate  no  expansion  of  Euro- 
pean Powers  on  this  hemisphere.  But  what 
we  say  in  effect  is  that  some  of  the  richest 
portions  of  Central  and  South  America  shall 
remain  undeveloped  in  the  hands  of  incom- 
petents, unless  outside  private  interests  are 
willing  to  undertake  the  work  under  the  pil- 
fering tyranny  of  their  farcical  governments. 

It  is  a  novel  attitude  of  protection  for  our 
government  to  assume,  unbidden,  toward  in- 
competency on  so  grand  a  scale.  Such  has 
never  been  the  habit  of  the  dominant  Aryan. 
It  would  be,  perhaps,  ethically  correct  if  the 
ethical  consideration  were  sincerely  back  of 
it,  but  that  pretense  would  deceive  nobody. 
We  were  not  so  tender  of  the  American  In- 
dian's right  to  his  undeveloped  country.  We 
imposed  upon  him  a  civilization  which  he  did 
not  want,  while  dispossessing  him  of  lands 
which  he  most  earnestly  did  want,  giving 
always  the  color  of  legal  enactments  to  what 
in  its  essentials  was  never  a  whit  more  than 

192  ' 


ENGLISH,  OR  GERMAN  ? 

the  ages-old  driving  of  the  weak  before  the 
strong. 

By  the  way,  if  after  the  teachings  of  this 
book  the  reader  wants  further  evidence  of 
the  persistence  of  human  character  traits 
down  through  the  ages  unaffected  by  environ- 
ment, he  can  find  it  in  the  Indian  record  of 
his  own  United  States.  The  unswerving  de- 
termination to  have  and  to  hold,  and  the 
comprehending  humanity  that  softens  the 
bitterness  in  its  wake,  are  both  in  us,  un- 
changed from  the  old  Briton. 

However  kindly  our  feelings  may  be  toward 
our  Southern  neighbors,  the  Monroe  Doctrine 
was  not  intended  to  express  them.  It  is  a 
device  to  save  ourselves  the  inconvenience  of 
powerful  neighbors;  and  a  clever  one  it  would 
be  if  it  did  not  happen  to  entail  the  virtual 
closing  of  a  huge  portion  of  the  earth  to 
reasonable  development  for  the  good  of  man- 
kind. There's  the  rub.  The  world  has  never 
before  had  to  deal  with  its  like,  but  it  is 
against  all  experience  in  human  affairs  that 
a  barrier  so  artificial  set  across  the  natural 
course  of  ascendant  peoples  should  hold  in- 
definitely. 

193 


MANKIND 

With  the  Hght  of  our  new  knowledge  of 
racial  values  thrown  upon  this  problem  we 
should  restudy  it  most  earnestly.  If  it  ap- 
pears that  sometime  domination  by  ascendant 
Aryans  must  come  to  those  oft-distracted 
peoples,  which  shall  it  be — Prussianism,  that 
must  break  whatever  it  cannot  bend  to  its 
unyielding  Kultur,  or  the  strong,  satisfying 
guidance  of  the  speakers  of  English  ?  The  de- 
cision will  affect  the  welfare  of  both  Americas. 
Its  importance  gives  us  another  reason  for 
making  our  kinship  with  English-speaking 
peoples  a  more  effective  relation  than  it  now  is. 

So  we  look  out  upon  a  future  clouded  with 
perplexities  which  can  scarcely  be  defined. 
Against  that  uncertain  future  we  must  pre- 
pare. An  unshakable  bond  of  mutual  un- 
derstanding between  the  speakers  of  English 
is  the  most  obvious  preparation.  But  that 
alone  will  not  suffice.  We  know  that  in  the 
affairs  of  men  mere  numbers  are  of  little 
avail,  and  the  accumulated  trappings  of 
civilization  have  in  themselves  no  lasting 
strength.  The  source  of  all  strength  is  in 
an  abounding  racial  vigor.    It  is  the  one  sure 

194 


ENGLISH,  OR  GERMAN? 

reliance  for  the  meeting  of  whatever  may 
come.  It  is  the  motive  power  behind  all 
successful  human  effort,  and  the  failing  of 
it  is  the  palsy  that  marks  nations  for  de- 
struction. 

The  truth  of  these  things  is  making  uneasy 
those  whom  superiority  has  heretofore  made 
confident.  They  are  beginning  to  see  limits 
to  their  most  essential  resource;  to  see  that 
without  racial  strength  the  mere  numbers 
of  the  world's  inferior  hordes  might  indeed 
prevail  against  them. 

The  threat  of  racial  failure  has  given  life  to 
a  new  enterprise  for  the  conservation  of  hu- 
man values — Eugenics,  "Well-born.''  So  far 
it  is  the  beginning  of  a  promise.  But  in  its 
main  idea  are  possibilities  now  unthought  of, 
awaiting  only  man's  necessity  and  determina- 
tion, to  serve  the  race. 


195 


CHAPTER  XVIII 
EUGENICS 

POSITIVE  AND  NEGATIVE  METHODS — ABUSE  OF  EUGENIC 
WARNINGS — UNWARRANTED  ALARMS — EUGENICS  BY 
COMPULSION — ITS  INEFFECTIVE  APPLICATION — SOCIAL 
WORKERS — EUGENICS  FOR  THE  WHOLE   COMMUNITY 

THE  aim  of  eugenics  is  to  improve  the 
hereditary  quaHties  of  the  race.  Eu- 
genics can  hardly  be  considered  as  a  science 
by  itself.  It  is  rather  a  propaganda  that 
makes  use  of  various  departments  of  knowl- 
edge for  the  furtherance  of  its  ideals. 

In  its  positive  aspect  eugenics  undertakes 
to  promote  intelligent  matings  among  the  fit 
and  to  increase  the  number  of  their  offspring. 
Negatively,  its  object  is  to  educate  and  warn 
against  unfit  matings.  These  are  the  two 
methods  usually  dwelt  upon  in  eugenic  liter- 
ature. A  third,  which  might  be  termed  eu- 
genics by  compulsion,  urges  the  imposition  of 
definite  prohibitory  measures  by  the  fit  upon 
the  careless  fecundity  of  the  unfit.  In  this 
there  is  greater  promise  of  effectiveness  than 

196 


EUGENICS 

in  all  other  eugenic  devices  combined.  Each 
of  these  methods  will  be  reviewed  in  turn. 

Positive  eugenics,  seeking  as  it  does  an  in- 
creased propagation  among  the  superior  stocks 
of  the  race,  offers  at  first  glance  an  exceed- 
ingly attractive  prospect.  No  doubt  the 
propaganda  for  a  higher  conception  of  racial 
duties  among  the  better  stocks  will  have  a 
certain  good  effect,  but  it  comes  directly 
against  the  universal  experience  of  man  that 
congeniality  of  acquired  tastes,  the  appeal  of 
affection  or  personal  attractiveness,  some- 
times wealth  or  social  position,  and,  not  least, 
the  accident  of  propinquity,  are  the  most 
natural  determiners  in  the  choice  of  mate. 
None  of  these  is  much  concerned  with  actual 
inheritance  values.  It  would  be  difficult  to 
conceive  of  the  naturally  inclined  man  or 
woman  putting  away  these  considerations  and 
deliberately  setting  out  to  pursue  the  eugenic 
ideal.  If  consideration  of  heredity  appears  at 
all,  it  is  afterward,  and  as  a  censor,  to  let  pass 
or  condemn  the  proposed  mating.  But  this 
at  once  puts  the  case  into  the  realm  of  nega- 
tive eugenics. 

In  its  negative  aspect,  with  Its  warnings 
197 


MANKIND 

against  matlngs  which  would  be  apt  to  result 
in  unfit  children,  eugenics  first  gets  into  range 
of  practicability.  A  great  many  unfortunate 
marriages  which  are  now  consummated  in 
blissful  ignorance  would  be  avoided  through 
a  proper  understanding  of  eugenic  principles. 
Undoubtedly  a  workable  advisory  system  will 
in  time  be  devised  for  the  dissemination  of 
eugenic  knowledge.  But  the  propaganda  is 
also  capable  of  doing  infinite  harm  in  excusing 
or  alarming  those  who  have  no  really  sub- 
stantial impediment  to  fit  parenthood. 

To  begin  with,  these  eugenic  warnings  reach 
more  particularly  the  intelligent,  alert,  sus- 
taining elements  of  society — the  very  individ- 
uals who  have  least  need  of  them.  They 
awaken  little  interest  among  the  great  middle 
masses,  and  touch  not  at  all  the  incompetents 
who  are  the  principal  source  of  depreciated 
human  material.  This  is  the  fundamental 
weakness  of  eugenics  as  a  voluntary  measure. 

Those  of  a  community  who  have  the  best 
genetic  values,  already  pressed  by  social  and 
economic  considerations  to  put  aside  their 
racial  duty,  now  meet  the  eugenist,  setting 
up  a  new  obstacle.     It  is  a  trick  of  human 

198 


EUGENICS 

nature  that  those  in  search  of  excuse  should 
be  the  most  easily  alarmed.  Any  individual 
in  the  land  wishing  to  escape  his  duty  to  the 
race  can  manage  to  find  in  his  ancestry  one 
or  more  of  the  racial  imperfections  to  which 
eugenics  has  directed  its  "Thou  shalt  not." 
This  may  easily  be  the  determining  factor  in 
killing  off  many  a  line  rich  in  inheritance 
values. 

Then,  too,  in  these  days  when  the  economic 
problem  rises  up  between  a  normal  young 
man  and  his  honest  family  desires,  his  courage 
is  not  at  all  assisted  by  the  numerous  ques- 
tions which  eugenics  would  put  to  the  woman 
of  his  choice.  Admonished  to  look  into  her 
ancestry,  he  discovers  that  all  four  of  her 
grandparents  died  of  something.  Of  course 
this  is  no  news  to  him;  the  novelty  is  in  con- 
templating the  chilly  fact  as  a  eugenic  prop- 
osition, and  it  gives  him  a  new  and  terrifying 
view  of  the  young  lady.  No  matter  if  her 
grandparents  lived  with  no  more  than  the 
usual  discomforts  to  a  reasonable  age;  he  sees 
at  once  four  different  means  for  her  taking 
off,  and  four  distinct  afflictions  lying  in  wait 
for  his  prospective  children.     Thus  the  eu- 

199 


MANKIND 

genie  idea,  besides  excusing  him  who  wants 
no  children  at  all,  overworks  the  imagination 
of  him  who  would  have  the  best  of  children. 
Eugenics,  in  its  rightful  search  for  imperfec- 
tions which  would  mar  the  effective  years  of 
human  life,  unpleasantly  discloses  age,  in- 
firmity, death — things  which  nature  has  be- 
neficently put  in  the  background  of  the  mind. 

Probably  no  other  propaganda  of  a  semi- 
technical  nature  has  met  with  as  much  de- 
structive unintelligence.  Its  almost  morbid 
appeal  to  the  imagination  is  seized  upon  by 
space  writers  to  spread  grotesque  misinforma- 
tion broadcast.  Newspaper  items  relate  all 
sorts  of  cases  which  illustrate  the  popular 
misunderstanding.  An  expectant  mother  will 
devote  herself  to  poetry,  music,  and  all  beau- 
tiful things.  Sometimes  the  father  catches 
the  notion  of  the  hour,  and  goes  in  for  lofty 
thinking.  The  mother,  so  far  as  any  effect 
on  her  child  is  concerned,  might  as  well  take 
to  shoplifting,  or  knitting  tidies,  or  marching 
with  the  suffragettes. 

It  will  be  a  grand  day  for  parenthood  when 
parents  come  to  realize  that  the  character 
equipment  of  their  child  is  as  much  a  deter- 

200 


EUGENICS 

mined  fact  at  the  time  of  conception  as  it  is 
that  a  tree  shall  bear  peaches  or  apples  before 
it  has  pushed  its  first  shoot  above  ground. 
The  matter  of  heredity  must  be  attended  to 
before  marriage.  All  effects  thereafter  are 
environmental. 

The  appeal  of  eugenics  for  a  voluntary  ap- 
plication of  its  teachings  seems  to  be  fated  to 
abuse,  or  to  misinterpretation,  or  it  goes  un- 
heeded by  those  having  most  need  of  it.  We 
are  coming  to  a  realization  that  something 
more  effective  than  a  warning  finger  must  be 
behind  its  well-meant  advice. 

Eugenics  by  compulsion  is  that  "something 
more."  It  does  not  wait  upon  the  absurd 
expectation  that  intelligence  and  co-operation 
will  manifest  themselves  in  quarters  where 
neither  exists.  Its  ideal  of  complete  effective- 
ness is  in  putting  the  reproductive  function 
of  the  entire  community  under  the  calm  judg- 
ment of  authority,  just  as  is  every  other 
human  activity  that  touches  upon  social  wel- 
fare. Naturally,  these  judgments  will  fall 
most  upon  those  least  inclined  toward  them. 
This  is  the  universal  experience  of  restrictive 
government,  and  the  object  of  it.     There  is 

201 


MANKIND 

no  reason  except  the  obsolete  one  of  custom 
why  the  function  most  vitally  concerning  the 
human  race  should  not  submit,  as  all  lesser 
functions  have  submitted,  to  intelligent  gui- 
dance. 

Toward  the  full  attainment  of  this  ideal  we 
have  travelled  about  one  short  step.  There  is 
a  growing  recognition  of  the  necessity  for  cut- 
ting off  the  increase  of  downright  human  un- 
fitness, but  public  indifference  to  even  this 
first  essential  in  race  preservation  is  evidenced 
by  the  segregation  of  less  than  one-fourth  of 
the  country's  obviously  feeble-minded.  In 
Massachusetts,  for  example,  there  are  some 
fifteen  thousand  persons  who  admittedly 
should  be  segregated.  There  is  room  for  less 
than  one-sixth  of  these  in  the  State's  institu- 
tions. Organizations  acquainted  with  condi- 
tions attending  the  free  sex-relations  of  the 
remaining  five-sixths  have  spent  years  in  at- 
tempting by  every  means  of  publicity  to 
arouse  opinion  throughout  the  State.  They 
still  implore  and  beg  in  vain  of  the  lawmakers 
for  one  more  institution  which  shall  take  care 
of  a  few  hundreds  out  of  the  many  thousands 
still  at  large. 

202 


EUGENICS 

One  cause  of  this  blindness  to  the  necessities 
of  race  is  the  present  mania  for  development 
of  the  individual,  setting  environment  above 
everything.  Those  who  should  be  looking 
after  both  our  racial  and  environmental  wel- 
fare have  gone  education-mad — and  the  ve- 
hemence of  their  enthusiasm  has  set  them 
mostly  at  loggerheads.  There  is  a  certain 
humor  in  the  fact  that  a  people  so  particular 
as  to  the  quality  of  materials  which  go  to  the 
making  of  its  pianos,  pigs,  and  flowers  should 
be  willing  to  take  its  human  material  blind- 
folded. A  saner  view  of  both  education  and 
heredity  must  be  developed  before  real  prog- 
ress can  be  made  in  conservation  of  racial 
values. 

Of  all  persons  in  the  community,  it  does 
seem  that  social  workers,  having  so  much  to 
do  with  the  kind  whose  prolific  increase  is 
doing  serious  racial  havoc,  should  approach 
every  one  of  their  problems  with  a  compre- 
hensive appreciation  of  inheritance  values. 
Keeping  an  utterly  incompetent  family  to- 
gether is  little  more  than  multiplying  it  into 
six  or  eight  families  for  social  workers  of  the 
next  generation  to  look  after.     Enthusiasm 

203 


MANKIND 

for  social  work  does  not  need  dampening;  it 
needs  redirecting  to  the  work  of  stopping  al- 
together the  propagation  of  such  unfit  mate- 
rial. A  conception  that  one  is  working  toward 
the  elimination  of  these  unhappy  families  for 
all  time,  instead  of  temporarily  bolstering 
them  up  for  further  increase  of  unfitness, 
should  heighten  enthusiasm  for  social  work. 

If  child-rescuing  agencies,  bent  on  taking 
away  the  offspring  of  these  miserably  unfit 
parents,  would  come  to  realize  that  in  too 
many  instances  Little  Wanderers'  Homes 
clear  the  way  for  other  little  wanderers  to  ap- 
pear, they  might  see  the  necessity  for  devising 
means  to  stop  completely  the  output  of  such 
families. 

The  usual  answer  of  social  workers  to  sug- 
gestions of  this  sort  is  that  facilitating  the 
increase  of  the  unfit  is  an  unavoidable  inci- 
dent of  their  work.  This  answer  condemns 
their  method  without  satisfying  the  complaint 
in  the  least.  This  is  not  the  day  for  unques- 
tioning acceptance  of  results  so  dangerously 
ambiguous. 

We  do  not  apprehend  the  actual  degree  of 
supervision  of  parenthood  which  eventually 
must  come  if  the  present  standard  of  human 

204 


EUGENICS 

quality  Is  to  be  maintained.  Suppose  that 
every  defective  in  the  land  were  segregated 
during  the  entire  reproductive  period — the 
full  attainment  of  present  eugenic  endeavor. 
Then  suppose  that  the  great  army  of  scarcely 
committable  "borderliners,"  the  ineffectives, 
were  w^holly  cut  off  from  reproducing  by  ster- 
ilization or  other  means — a  wild  supposition, 
something  unattainable  in  the  present  state 
of  opinion.  This  would  rid  society  of  its 
tremendous  burden  of  the  specially  unfit. 
But  what  would  it  add  to  the  specially  fit  at 
the  other  end  of  the  scale,  the  prime  essential 
in  any  civilization  ^  Nothing.  Civilization's 
critical  disease  is  the  failure  of  its  best  stocks, 
not  the  fecundity  of  its  worst.  And  elimina- 
tion of  unfitness  scarcely  touches  this  disease. 
An  orchard  prone  to  decay  cannot  be  forever 
trimmed  out  unless  new  trees  are  planted. 
But  a  meaning  not  thus  far  disclosed  can 
be  read  into  the  eugenic  ideal.  Its  complete 
effectiveness  is  in  putting  the  reproductive 
function  of  the  whole  community  under  the 
calm  judgment  of  authority.  "The  whole 
community" — that  includes  the  best  as  well 
as  the  worst  of  us.  The  final  chapter  is  a 
speculation  based  on  this  idea. 

205 


CHAPTER  XIX 

CONCLUSION 

NATURE  REQUIRES  FECUNDITY  OF  ITS  STRONG — STATE 
INTERFERENCE  WITH  PARENTHOOD  AN  ESTABLISHED 
FACT — TRACING  ITS  PROBABLE  EXTENSION — IMPEND- 
ING NEED  IS  FERTILITY  OF  THE  SPECIALLY  ENDOWED 
— A  LOOK  INTO  THE  FUTURE — OUR  OBLIGATION  TO 
THE    RACE 

NATURE  maintains  vigor  of  species  not 
only  by  eliminating  unfitness,  but  by 
requiring  of  the  strong  a  fecundity  in  propor- 
tion to  their  strength.  Do  we  expect  to  save 
our  species  with  a  half-measure  ?  Are  we 
consistent  in  denying  parenthood  to  the  un- 
fit, while  the  specially  fit  are  permitted  to 
neglect  their  racial  duty  ? 

In  this  there  is  suggestion  of  some  entirely 
new  order  for  the  propagation  of  the  human 
race.  This  is  the  coming  of  a  new  age.  The 
old  has  vanished  with  its  simple  demands 
upon  human  capacity,  and  the  course  of  man 
is  left  in  a  sense  uncharted  among  strange 
difficulties.  The  forces  which  have  destroyed 
every  civilization  in  the  past  are  working  to- 

206 


CONCLUSION 

day  with  double  intensity.  For  the  first  time 
in  history,  unexploited  human  values  cannot 
be  drawn  upon  with  assurance  of  others  in 
reserve.  Never  before  were  these  values  so 
lavishly  expended. 

We  cannot  know  to  what  devices  a  race  so 
encompassed  may  turn  for  its  salvation.  But 
in  the  light  of  what  has  already  happened  we 
may  trace  the  course  of  human  breeding  at 
least  a  little  way  into  the  future. 

Until  less  than  one  hundred  years  ago  any 
organized  attempt  to  segregate  the  feeble- 
minded for  the  avowed  purpose  of  stopping 
their  sexual  activities  would  have  been  looked 
upon  as  a  blasphemous  interference  with  the 
plan  of  the  Almighty.  Impossible  people 
were  restrained,  but  their  sexual  deprivation 
was  an  incident  of  their  confinement,  not  the 
object  of  it.  Now,  we  check  the  reproduction 
of  defectives  with  as  little  compunction  as  a 
stockman  resists  the  incursion  of  scrub  Indian 
ponies  into  his  breeding-stables.  The  elemen- 
tary idea  that  there  is  no  moral,  social,  physi- 
cal, or  religious  obstacle  to  the  imposition  of 
sexual  control  is  becoming  fixed  in  the  pub- 
lic mind.     It  is  truly  a  wonderful  thing  that 

267 


MANKIND 

at  last  the  race  is  using  a  rudimentary  dis- 
crimination in  the  choice  of  its  parents. 

This  control  is  being  rapidly  extended  to 
Include  all  who  are  regarded  as  in  the  com- 
mittable  grade.  A  few  more  years,  or  per- 
haps a  generation  or  two,  will  end  the  sexual 
liberty  of  the  obviously  feeble-minded. 

The  next  real  advance  will  be  the  control  of 
parenthood  among  the  vast  group  of  "bor- 
derliners" — people  distinctly  antisocial,  yet 
hardly  committable  except  for  special  of- 
fenses. They  will  be  reached  somehow  as  the 
recognition  of  their  menace  grows,  even  if  it 
becomes  necessary  to  confine  them  for  the 
whole  reproductive  period.  But  in  all  prob- 
ability sterilization  will  have  an  important 
part  in  their  elimination.  Means  are  already 
at  command  for  depriving  either  sex  of  the 
power  to  reproduce,  without  causing  the  func- 
tional disturbances  which  attended  the  older 
and  more  drastic  methods.  The  full  applica- 
tion of  this  racial  remedy  can  come  only  after 
another  change  in  the  general  attitude  of 
mind  toward  the  imposing  of  sexual  restric- 
tions. Yet  this  advance  will  involve  nothing 
so  revolutionary  as  the  first  step  that  took  us 

208 


CONCLUSION 

away  from  an  almost  fatalistic  view  of  par- 
enthood. It  will  follow  logically  the  elimina- 
tion of  the  more  unfit. 

The  elimination  of  unfitness  is  not  to  be  a 
continuous  problem  of  anything  like  its  pres- 
ent immensity.  What  appalls  now  is  the 
vast  accumulation  of  unfitness  whose  self-per- 
petuation must  first  be  cut  off.  Once  we 
have  done  this  and  new  generations  are  born 
free  of  their  numerous  progeny,  the  few  spo- 
radic cases  of  hereditary  defect  appearing  in 
a  normally  bred  population  will  offer  no  real 
problem. 

A  happy  day  for  mankind,  we  think,  when 
a  merciful  oblivion  shall  have  closed  upon  its 
miserables.  Yet  if  nothing  shall  have  been 
done  in  the  meantime  to  overcome  the  per- 
sistent infertility  of  its  superlative  inheri- 
tances, these  also  will  have  disappeared  quite 
as  thoroughly,  and  the  race  will  find  itself  a 
vast  sea  of  human  mediocrity,  unable  to  do 
more  than  reflect  the  diminishing  glories  of  a 
past  age.  So  accustomed  are  we  to  seeing 
special  ability  rise  from  undeveloped  masses 
that  we  can  scarcely  imagine  a  whole  people 
whose  special  ability  has  been  developed  to 

209 


MANKIND 

the  point  of  self-extinction.  The  reaHzation 
of  this  will  come  to  our  successors  if  they 
hold  to  elimination  as  the  only  means  for 
preserving  the  race. 

But  our  forecast  of  the  course  of  human 
breeding  cannot  safely  go  beyond  the  prob- 
able wiping  out  of  hereditary  defect  among 
enlightened  peoples.  The  way  beyond  that 
to  civilization's  most  impending  need — the 
adequate  perpetuation  of  its  superior  inheri- 
tances— is  over  a  chasm  of  difficulties.  Our 
civilization  leads  its  most  effective  men  and 
women  so  inevitably  to  every  kind  of  worthy 
activity  except  that  of  rearing  an  abundance 
of  worthy  children,  that  we  cannot  picture 
them  as  turning  back  from  life's  engaging 
complexities  to  the  humdrum  of  race  building. 
Neither  could  we  in  our  present  state  devise 
any  scheme  of  persuasion  or  compulsion  for 
turning  them  back  in  anything  like  sufficient 
numbers.  Before  this  can  be  done  mankind 
must  arrive  upon  new  premises,  must  gain 
a  new  outlook,  from  which  our  position 
and  our  view  will  appear  wofully  circum- 
scribed. 

What  will  be  the  nature  of  the  new  prem- 

2IO 


CONCLUSION 

ises  and  the  new  outlook  ?     We  may  at  least 
surmise: 

The  men  and  women  of  that  day  will  have 
become  so  accustomed  to  methods  for  cutting 
off  undesirable  strains  that  the  principle  of 
state  interference  with  parenthood  will  not 
of  itself  prejudice  any  contemplated  action. 
Thus  to-day's  greatest  obstacle  to  effective 
race  improvement  will  have  been  cleared 
away. 

They  will  be  definitely  against  the  problem 
of  race  preservation,  which  for  us  is  only  in 
its  beginning.  Their  closer  view  of  it  will 
have  the  advantage,  too,  of  more  light — 
much  needed  light — on  matters  pertaining  to 
heredity  and  human  breeding. 

Long  contemplation  of  the  subject  which 
we  have  just  begun  to  study  will  have 
brought  them  to  a  discriminating  familiarity 
with  hereditary  values.  In  our  present  mar- 
riage system  they  will  see  race  conservation 
left  to  the  chance  of  every  human  emotion, 
from  love  of  riches  to  admiration  for  yellow 
hair.  On  the  other  hand,  an  intelligent  dis- 
tribution of  the  germ-plasmic  possibilities  of 
their  ablest  men  will  appeal  as  forcefully  to 

211 


MANKIND 

their  enlightened  sense  as  any  other  scientific 
breeding  prospect  now  appeals  to  us.  Then 
could  we  expect  the  thinking  men  of  that  day, 
sorely  pressed  by  the  consciousness  of  disap- 
pearing racial  values,  to  look  longingly  upon 
this  clear  advantage  to  the  race  without  de- 
vising some  honorable  means  for  attaining  it  ? 

How  they  would  attain  it  we  do  not  know. 
But  it  can  be  taken  for  granted  that  any 
method,  to  become  effective,  must  have  full 
sanction  of  law  and  society.  Free  love,  and 
all  other  devices  of  the  kind  whose  aim  is 
greater  sexual  license,  lead  straight  to  racial 
decay.  Birth  control,  as  a  voluntary  measure 
to  be  put  into  the  hands  of  the  general  public, 
has  the  fatal  defect  of  every  eugenic  appeal  to 
intelligence  and  foresight,  in  that  it  would  be 
adopted  by  the  intelligent  and  generally  ig- 
nored by  the  thriftless. 

The  irresponsible  are  forever  attempting  to 
get  away  from  the  unnatural  sex  condition 
under  which  man  alone  of  all  creatures  must 
of  necessity  live.  Unhappily,  a  checked  ap- 
petite becomes  a  distorted  appetite.  Civili- 
zation cannot  do  otherwise  than  impose  more 
or  less  sexual  restraint;  thus  a  most  whole- 

212 


CONCLUSION 

some  and  necessary  function  of  the  body  is 
made  to  appear  as  an  unclean  thing.  It  not 
only  takes  on  the  semblance  of  evil;  it  actu- 
ally becomes  a  source  of  infinite  social  harm. 
In  the  very  nature  of  things  it  can  be  subdued 
only  to  a  worse  behavior.  The  usual  mistake 
is  to  put  the  odium  of  this  evil  upon  the  func- 
tion itself,  rather  than  upon  its  unavoidable 
suppression. 

But  if  we  are  to  make  headway  toward  a 
solution  of  the  race's  great  problem,  the  sex 
relation  must  be  considered  in  its  original  in- 
tent, without  that  sense  of  uncleanliness  which 
leads  most  of  us  to  regard  marriage  as  giving 
respectability  to  an  otherwise  wicked  inclina- 
tion. Against  the  prejudice  of  ages  this  will 
be  difficult.  Suggestion  of  any  variation 
from  the  binding  of  two  personalities  for  life 
is  sure  to  be  regarded  as  an  attempt  to  pro- 
mote sensual  freedom.  Even  discussion  of 
the  possibilities  gives  a  wrench  to  certain 
deep-seated  notions,  supposed  to  be  of  vir- 
tuous origin,  but  in  truth  evidences  of  a  uni- 
versally enslaved  instinct.  We  proclaim  the 
breaking  down  of  the  so-called  "conspiracy 
of  silence,"  as  if  we  were  already  facing  the 

213 


MANKIND 

whole  matter  of  sex  with  perfect  candor.  In 
reahty  we  have  only  dragged  into  the  open  its 
festering  vices  and  iniquities.  Its  value  as  a 
constructive  agency  to  be  manipulated  for  the 
upbuilding  of  the  race  has  scarcely  come  into 
the  prospect.  If  regarded  in  the  light  of  its 
essential  goodness  of  purpose,  the  devising  of 
ways  for  a  more  intelligent  use  of  the  sex 
function  becomes  an  altogether  reasonable  and 
decent  human  concern,  and  we  are  quite  likely 
to  find  that  its  possibilities  were  not  wholly 
exhausted  by  the  institution  of  marriage. 

The  great  war  is  going  to  bring  this  question 
to  the  fore  generations  earlier,  perhaps,  than 
it  naturally  would  have  come.  The  score  of 
millions  now  fighting  are  the  picked  men  of 
Europe.  The  bravest  and  strongest  of  these, 
again,  assume  the  greater  risks  and  are  among 
the  killed  In  very  high  proportion.  Several 
millions  will  never  return.  The  disproportion 
between  women  and  men  of  all  grades  of 
effectiveness  will  be  depresslngly  obvious;  but 
the  excess  of  women  of  high  genetic  worth,  as 
against  the  surviving  men  who  could  be 
equally  worthy  fathers  of  their  children,  will 
be  the  most  portentous  racial  fact  after  the 

214 


CONCLUSION 

war.  If  custom  decrees  that  this  undimin- 
ished body  of  exceptional  women  shall  have 
its  normal  expectation  of  motherhood  cut 
down  to  meet  the  havoc  wrought  by  the  war 
upon  their  natural  mates,  Europe's  racial 
values  will  suffer  at  one  stroke  the  equiva- 
lent of  centuries  of  ordinary  racial  decline. 
Whether  or  not  we  think  that  this  states  a 
situation  impossible  to  remedy,  it  states  a 
truth  obvious  to  any  student  of  race. 

The  more  obvious  truth — the  coming  dis- 
parity in  the  numbers  of  women  and  men  of 
all  grades — has  not  escaped  general  recogni- 
tion. Ways  for  meeting  the  condition  are 
already  being  suggested.  With  the  return  of 
peace  the  stricken  peoples  are  certain  to  take 
up  the  matter  of  rehabilitating  their  human 
stock  as  one  of  their  acute  problems. 

At  least  two  grand  mistakes  could  be  made 
in  this  racial  crisis.  It  has  been  proposed  in 
behalf  of  one  nation — noted  for  its  insistence 
on  "food  for  cannon" — that  illegitimacy  on 
the  large  scale  be  countenanced,  or  at  least 
winked  at.  Doubtless  great  numbers  of  men 
would  rally  to  this  scheme,  but  it  must  be 
admitted   that   a   high   proportion   of  them 

215 


MANKIND 

would  be  of  the  irresponsible  and  character- 
less variety.  As  for  women,  illegitimacy  al- 
ways has  been  and  always  will  be  exclusively 
the  habit  of  the  weak  in  mind.  Few  women 
whose  progeny  would  be  worth  while  could  be 
persuaded  even  by  the  plea  of  duty  to  their 
country.  The  effect  of  the  scheme  would  be 
to  multiply  unfitness  among  peoples  sadly  in 
need  of  a  higher  proportion  of  fitness. 

The  mistake  more  likely  to  be  made  will  be 
to  encourage  the  fecundity  of  the  married  by 
a  system  of  proportional  rewards  in  position, 
employment,  relief  from  taxes,  and  other 
benefits,  in  the  endeavor  to  make  up  for  the 
enforced  barrenness  of  the  unmated  women. 
Every  such  appeal  takes  its  main  hold  upon 
the  least  valuable  elements  in  the  community. 
The  result  might  be  pleasing  to  the  worship- 
pers of  mere  numbers  as  the  source  of  national 
strength,  but  those  numbers  would  show  a 
still  greater  increase  in  the  disproportion  of 
the  inferior. 

The  whole  question  of  birth-rate  is  mud- 
dled by  failure  to  recognize  quality  as  a  req- 
uisite in  human  breeding.  There  is  not  a 
country  in  Europe  that  should  not  welcome 

216 


CONCLUSION 

a  lessened  total  of  births  as  a  Godsend. 
Their  problem  is  in  the  lessened  number  of 
males  of  the  sort  to  perpetuate  ability. 
Nothing  will  bring  back  the  superlative  dead 
to  mate  with  the  superlative  living.  The 
most  fertile  mating  in  pairs  of  Europe's  best 
will  not  relieve  the  inability  to  pair,  nor  re- 
store the  race's  top  values  to  their  normal 
proportion.     Yet  what  else  can  be  done  ? 

This  leads  again  into  the  realm  of  specula- 
tion. We  cannot  foresee  what  changes  in 
sentiment  and  custom  may  be  induced  by 
future  stressful  conditions.  We  do  not  even 
know  that  the  consummation  of  fatherhood 
may  not  sometime  be  wholly  disconnected 
from  personal  sensuality.  In  the  laboratory 
of  the  expert  floriculturist,  the  pollen  does  not 
need  the  wind  to  convey  it  to  fertilization. 
The  thought  of  such  an  artifice  is,  of  course, 
revolting  to  us,  but  we  might  as  well  view 
calmly  a  suggestion  not  intended  for  our  day 
and  age,  yet  remembering  that  seemingly  dim 
possibilities  have  a  way  of  coming  true  over- 
night. 

The  present  system  of  marriage  will  without 
doubt  continue  indefinitely  for  the  great  bulk 

217 


MANKIND 

of  mankind,  so  we  need  not  gasp  at  the  pros- 
pect of  a  future  moral  overturning.  Mar- 
riage is  one  of  the  few  conventions  of  society 
which  take  their  fundamentals  from  nature, 
and  for  reasonably  natural  human  conditions 
a  better  arrangement  is  hardly  conceivable. 
But  as  conditions  of  living  become  more  arti- 
ficial and  a  civilization  approaches  its  critical 
need  with  respect  to  race  values,  marriage 
fails  in  its  chief  purpose  among  the  very  ones 
whose  progeny  is  most  needed.  The  best  of 
the  race  not  only  grow  away  from  the  habit 
of  large  families;  the  many  social  exactions  of 
marriage  lead  them  habitually  to  mismate. 
A  highly  complex  society  develops  in  its 
strong  men  and  strong  women  so  many  points 
of  individual  sensitiveness  that  their  living 
together  is  made  difficult.  If  they  marry 
late,  as  they  are  inclined  to  do,  they  seldom 
choose  each  other.  In  decent  regard  for  his 
own  happiness  the  man  usually  marries  for 
qualities  which  can  be  lived  with,  while  the 
woman  either  remains  single  or  takes  up  with 
a  docile  worshipper.  In  any  case  the  race 
loses  the  enriching  effect  that  can  come  only 
from    their    combined    inheritances,    because 

218 


CONCLUSION 

they  have  an  honest  distaste  for  spending 
their  whole  Hves  in  each  other's  company. 

The  ideal  of  any  breeding  system  is  to 
bring  together  the  best  of  the  species  in  their 
most  effective  combinations,  unhampered  by 
any  other  condition.  In  our  own  case  this 
ideal  is  not  wholly  appropriate,  yet  we  might 
hope  to  advance  toward  it  as  we  grow  wiser. 
But  as  we  grow  wiser  the  insistent  details  of 
marriage  more  and  more  obscure  the  race- 
building  ideal. 

Of  course  it  is  way  beyond  the  function  of 
society,  with  its  present  view,  to  impose  the 
rearing  of  children  on  anybody.  Yet  we  are 
learning  to  say  with  growing  insistence  to  one 
group  in  the  community:  "You  must  let  your 
miserable  inheritances  die  with  you.  This  is 
not  ordered  as  a  punishment.  Involuntarily 
you  have  brought  something  out  of  the  past 
which  is  not  good  for  society,  and  it  must  be 
left  behind  as  the  race  goes  forward."  Per- 
haps sometime  we  may  learn  to  say  to  this 
other  group:  "You  must  perpetuate  your 
valuable  inheritances.  You  did  not  create 
them — ages  of  selection  and  fortuitous  com- 
bination passed  them  on  to  you,  and  they 

219 


MANKIND 

are    not    yours    to    dispose    of    at    conven- 
ience." 

It  is  a  futile  hope  that  any  voluntary  scheme 
will  restore  the  birth-rate  of  this  group  to 
normal  proportions.  An  obligation  of  some 
kind  is  essential.  It  is  conceivable  that  so- 
ciety, when  it  shall  have  learned  better  to 
recognize  exceptionally  worthy  conservators 
of  the  race,  may  put  upon  these  few  an  obli- 
gation other  than  marriage — one  equally  hon- 
orable and  under  regulation,  but  dispensing 
with  the  test  of  living  together  and  having  for 
its  prime  object  a  high-bred  progeny.  As- 
suming that  marriage  will  remain  indefinitely 
as  the  convention  of  all  but  the  few,  the  exist- 
ing order  need  not  be  in  the  least  disturbed. 
There  is  no  fundamental  reason  in  nature 
why  parenthood  should  be  forever  linked  with 
the  terrors  and  joys  of  lifelong  companion- 
ship. Conservation  of  exceptional  race  values 
may  become  too  important  a  matter  to  be 
always  bound  up  with  the  host  of  minor  con- 
siderations which  lead  people  to  marry  or  not 
to  marry,  to  have  children  or  not  to  have 
children. 

The  war  has  made  marriage  impossible  for 
220 


CONCLUSION 

a  vast  number  of  Europe's  best  women.  A 
more  liberal  convention  would  give  to  every 
woman  of  superior  inheritance  the  honorable 
right  to  have  children — children  of  a  selected 
paternity  which  would  inspire  the  mother 
with  high  expectations  for  their  future.  Even 
in  normal  times  and  in  our  own  country  there 
are  well-born  women  by  the  tens  of  thou- 
sands, unmated  because  of  the  very  qualities 
which  indicate  their  high  genetic  worth,  who 
are  held  to  a  round  of  somewhat  meagre  in- 
terests, because  there  is  no  acceptable  way 
for  the  exercise  of  a  perfectly  wholesome 
bodily  function  which  would  bring  to  them 
the  greatest  of  gifts  and  the  noblest  of  occu- 
pations, and  to  the  world  a  new  generation  of 
the  well-born.  Interest  in  motherhood  might 
revive  in  the  hearts  of  noble  women  if  it  were 
so  that  they  could  as  honorably  receive  the 
paternity  of  their  children  from  some  com- 
manding figure  among  men  as  they  now  re- 
ceive his  ideals,  or  his  books,  or  his  lectures, 
or  any  other  bestowal  of  his  exceptional  gifts. 
Why  should  not  a  woman,  glowing  under  the 
inspiration  of  a  master  mind,  exclaim  from 
the  purity  of  her  soul:  "Fortunate  would  be 

221 


MANKIND 

any  woman  whose  child  might  have  the  pros- 
pect of  that  superb  inheritance!" 

None  but  a  presumptuous  individual  would 
attempt  now  to  forecast  the  details  of  a  new 
convention;  the  skill  of  Europe  may  be  en- 
gaged upon  this  problem  sooner  than  we  think. 
These  views  are  merely  speculative;  yet  we 
can  hardly  get  on  unsafe  ground  as  long  as  we 
stick  to  the  view  that  no  arrangement  of  the 
kind  is  possible  that  does  not  have  as  com- 
plete sanction  as  is  bestowed  by  the  marriage 
ceremony.  Then  why  should  we  not  con- 
template without  foreboding  the  inevitable 
thrashing  out  of  the  sex-relation  after  the 
war,  if  we  are  confident  that  any  effective 
advance  must  bring  the  reproductive  func- 
tion into  a  more,  not  a  less,  wholesome  re- 
pute .? 

We  in  America  cannot  square  ourselves 
with  posterity  by  merely  cutting  off  feeble- 
mindedness. At  Its  best  this  would  be  a 
negative  achievement.  A  generation  so  ex- 
travagant with  its  human  resources  should  be 
as  intently  working  at  the  other  end — the 
big  end — of  the  problem  of  human  breeding. 
Not  only  devastated  Europe  will  be  in  need 

222 


CONCLUSION 

of  a  constructive  racial  policy.  Our  own 
racial  values  are  in  a  condition  which  could 
scarcely  have  been  brought  to  pass  by  several 
wars.  There  is  no  more  patriotic  study  for 
true  Americans  than  the  adequate  perpetua- 
tion of  the  racial  values  which  have  made  of 
us  a  great  nation.  The  absolutely  unique 
conditions  under  which  the  world's  effective 
inheritances  must  ever  hereafter  be  bred 
should  command  the  thoughtful  attention  of 
every  lover  of  Mankind. 


223 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA   LIBRARY 

Los  Angeles 
This  book  is  DLL  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


BfC^  LD-URt 


JM  2  9  1979 

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